Ralph_Slate - 5:54 pm on Oct 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

I don't think that Penguin outweighs all the other parts. I think that a strong backlink profile for a specific page can negate Penguin; I was hit on April 24 - not sure if it is Penguin or Panda - I am still seeing many of my pages ranking at the #1 position or on the first page; however others with similar amounts of content are not found in the first few pages, and others are nowhere to be found anywhere in the SERPS.

Due to the nature of my site some of my pages could be perceived to be thin - some widget pages are naturally thinner than others - and I think that in the past my domain authority allowed those pages to rank. Now a lot of long-tail pages are not ranking at all, even behind spam pages, scraped pages (which ironically often link to my unranked page) and pages that aren't even remotely related to the query.

It is clear that my site has a penalty, but again, many pages are able to overcome it, and I think the answer is the backlinks.