tedster - 3:22 pm on Mar 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

Panda was never an update. Just 19 year old ex-high school kids playing around.

I've read similar sentiments from others, too. IMO, it's not a good idea to be that dismissive about Panda. At this point it's a project that's been worked on for over two years, one of them development and now live.

The goal of measuring "quality" algorithmically is extremely ambitious and certainly has had some misfires. But ignoring this new direction in ranking is likely to create frustration and anger. We may not ever reverse engineer the Panda portion of the total algorithm, but we can understand the goals. There's a lot to ranking these days that few people considered to be SEO in the recent past.