What the historical name actually refers to
Google announced Panda in 2011 as a system intended to promote high-quality, original content. Google's current ranking-systems guide lists it under retired systems and says it evolved into the core ranking systems in 2015.
That matters because “Panda hit” sounds more precise than the evidence allows. There is no current Panda report in Search Console and no Panda reconsideration form. A loss that resembles an old thin-content case still needs a current investigation.
Do not turn historical explanation into a proprietary mechanism
Patents, old rollout analyses, and remembered thresholds can explain possibilities. They do not prove which production system evaluated a page today. Google operates multiple systems and changes them over time; a historical patent phrase is not a diagnosis of an individual domain.
The defensible question is simpler: which page groups lost which queries, and what useful contribution do those pages make compared with current alternatives? That comparison can reveal templated near-duplicates, recycled descriptions, unhelpful aggregation, weak ownership, or a result intent that has moved elsewhere.
Improve a page family at its source
If a template produces hundreds of pages whose only distinction is a swapped location or product noun, editing five examples will not change the system. Decide which pages have an independent reader job, consolidate the rest, and rebuild the surviving template around data or judgment specific to that job.
Keep pages that are useful even when their demand is modest. Remove or merge pages because the reader job is duplicated or unsupported, not because a sitewide score turned red.
Measure current behavior
After changes, verify crawling, indexing, canonicals, internal destinations, and the affected query/page groups. Google says significant improvements can take time to be recognized and do not guarantee a visible ranking change.
For current broad ranking changes, use the core update framework. Panda can supply context without pretending the old label is still an actionable system boundary.