crobb305 - 10:51 pm on Apr 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

It is what you are not seeing that is making the difference. You are chasing red herrings...

I tend to agree with respect to most of the visual elements, but this is a good thread to try to find some common ground. Without having the algorithm secrets, we need a starting point.

I pointed out that I have a site that soared after Panda 30% in a very dark template. It has very clean code, loads very fast, and has good text to html ratios. I do have a couple of affiliate links on minimal pages, but those apparently made no difference. I use no banner ads generated from a network or another server. That's why I was making a statement a moment ago about server requests (for banner ads), slow-loading elements, etc., which is a commonality among many of the sites we are examining.

[edited by: crobb305 at 10:58 pm (utc) on Apr 14, 2011]