claaarky - 9:32 pm on Aug 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

Aakk999, that is also my experience. Sections of our site hit by Panda are also the parts that got a negative reaction from google when we tried overcoming our demotion with quality links.

I think the point of Penguin is that links aren't the thing that drives rankings any more, they are just a signal but if the page doesn't justify ranking well for a phrase it won't rank well regardless of how great your links are.

I've heard too many stories of successful sites that did no link building and focused purely on user engagement to believe links matter much any more.

There is no doubt in my mind that google has sufficient access to user metrics for it to be a major component to the algo. Mobile is another matter, but google is on the case with that one and once they have sufficient data from mobile users I think we'll see mobile and non-mobile results starting to look very different from each other.

It just seems to me google wants the link building to stop and penguin amongst other things does seem to be having that effect.