tedster - 12:24 am on Jul 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

Why did people with unique and interesting content get Panda slapped, and why did my least optimized site get Penguin?

Mostly because our understanding of both algorithms is grossly simplistic. For example, Panda took over a year for Google to develop, and yet SEOs talk about as if it were an addition to the regular algorithm, and looking at just a couple factors in the normal way. It's MUCH more complex than that!

Penguin was built on a similar machine learning model, you can be certain. And we will not be able to reverse engineer those two, IMO. Find some loopholes, yes - but that's not reverse engineering.