tedster - 4:24 am on Jan 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

Do I misunderstand "algorithm" in thinking that this somewhat "manual" adjustment reflects poorly on the site rank zapping that Panda has placed on others "automatically"?

Panda is not a penalty, albo, it's the 10-month old quality assessment part of the overall ranking algorithm.

This is a manually applied spam penalty (for one link!) that Matt Cutts said will last for "at least 60 days".