Now that the latest round of Panda updates has rolled out, it is obvious that the Private Blog Networks (PBN’s) downfall was baked into the latest Panda algorithm.

When the PBN’s were first hit, they were the recipients of penalties in Google Webmaster Tools for having “thin content with little or no added value.” This was confusing to many since realisticly, if a PBN was going to get hit, it would be for backlinks, since many of them are interconnected in some way.  But in the context of a Panda update happening at the same time, the thin content penalty makes sense.

However, some PBNs that were hit had quality unique content and they were still penalized, so it seems more likely that Panda was a convenient way to deal with PBNs without waiting for an eternal Penguin update, especially since it was going to be noticeable that Google had them in the crosshairs.