timwilliams - 12:03 pm on Aug 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

at least while Penguin is letting so many weak pages float up.

That's an interesting point. Penguin and the regular algo seem to be in a tug of war, at least for our site. Penguin has manually actioned a page on our site for a specific keyword but the algo wants to return a result from our site, as it should (IMHO). The algo can't show the most relevant page due the manual action. So it shows other pages from the site, very poor matches most of the time.

My guess, if this even is an issue, is that the fix would be to make the manual actions site-wide by keyword. And that's probably not good news.