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Hi SEOmoz community! I would like to try to give a small (well...) case study of a Farmer victim and some logical conclusions of mine that you are more then welcome to shred to pieces. So, I run MANY sites ranging from low to super quality and actually have a few that have been hit by farmer but this particular site had me scratching my head as to why it was torched. Quick background: Sitei s in a very competetive niche, been around since 2004 initially as a forum site but from 2005 also a content driven site. Site is an affiliate site and has been ranking top 5 for many high-value commercial KW's and has a big long-tail of informational kw's. Limk profile is a mix between natural, good links and purchased links from various qualilty sources. Content is high quality written articles, how-to's, blog posts etc. by in-house pro writers plus UGC from a semi active forum (20-30 posts a day). Farmer: After Farmer, this site's vertical is pretty much same as before with the biggest exception being my site. I quickly discounted low-quality content (spider-food) and focused instead on technical reasons. I took this approach since this site isn't the most well kept site I have and I figured the crappy CMS + PHPBB might have caused isseus. I didn't want to waste my time crawling the site myself so I quickly downloaded all the URLs that Majestic had crawled. Too my surprise the result of Majestic's crawler was over 3 million URLs when the real number would likley be 30-40k and Google has about 20k indexed. After scanning through the file with URLs I knew I had issues. Massive amounts of auto-generated dupe pages from the forum and so on. By adding around 20 new lines to robots.txt I was able to block millions of pages from being crawled again. My logic: Ok, so now I think I've found what caused the drop. Milllions of dupe pages and empty pages could have tripped the Farmer algo update to think the site is low quality or dupe or just trying to feed the spiders with uselessness. My WEAK point in this logic is that I can't prove that Google even knew about (or smart enough to ignore them). Google WMT tells me they've crawled an average of around 10k pages the last 90 days. Given this I'm doubting my logic and if I've found the issue or not. My next step is to see if this gets resolved algorithmically or not, if not i feel I have a legitimate case to submit a reinclusion request but i'm not sure? Since I haven't been a contributing member to this community I'm not looking to get direct help with my site, but hopefully this could spark some discussion about Farmer and maybe some flaming of my logic regarding the update 🙂 So, would any of you have drawn similar conclusions as I did? (Sweet blog bro!)