tedster - 5:32 am on Oct 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

What if a site noindexes its affiliate content or other "low quality pages" but still links to them from every indexed page of the site. Could that be poisoning a site?

Well, in eight months of Panda I haven't seen even one reported recovery from the noindex approach alone. I suppose there's a chance if there's is some really knock-out great content on the other pages.

I don't think that affiliate content alone poisons a site in Panda - there are too many counter-examples to that idea. But if you mean just publishing whatever the affiliate program pushes out in their feed, that was already problematic even before Panda. It's what Google called "thin" content, whereas Panda is targeting what they called "shallow" content.