Robert_Charlton - 9:58 pm on Oct 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

our combined strength

Let's get real. Using the number of AdSense sites as a very rough indicator of say, who "we" might be... and I realize that there are lots of other commercial web enterprises that don't run AdSense... rough estimates of a year ago put the number of AdSense sites at c1.5 million.

Also, rough estimates of a year ago put the number of sites on the web as something like 150-million to 200-million. So, we're talking about maybe 1% of sites perhaps in a pre-"we" ballpark... ie, before we consider Panda.

Panda hit maybe 10-20% of sites on the web. It's very likely that more of these sites affected by Panda were AdSense or commercial sites than non-commercial.

I think we can say that the number of AdSense sites affected by Panda was likely larger than 1% of 1% of the sites on the web, and probably less than 100% of 1% of the sites on the web. This again is a rough order-of-magnitude kind of guesstimate... and it doesn't include other algo factors, ad display effects, etc... and it is a jump in logic. Not all Pandalized sites were AdSense, I'm sure. I'm just trying to get a very rough numbers.

Also, let's keep in mind that for every site that went down, another site went up. I'm not saying I like all of the results I see when I search, but I am saying that "we" is likely to be an extremely small percentage of the webmasters on the web.

PS: I should add to the above that several of my favorite sites on the web are entirely AdSense and affiliate driven, and they continue to rank at the top of the serps.