What Happened Yesterday with Google, and What Can I Do About it?

Is Jagger the Reason My Site with Affiliate LinksDropped Way Down in Google

[rubensierra]

I've been a lurker on here for a while but yesterday all of a sudden I did searhced for some terms for which I used to be #1 or #2 and in all of them I'm not on the first 2 pages. I read 90 pages of the jagger thread and I still can't figure out if google has implemented its changes but I assume they have. The other possibility is my site has been down a few hours recently so perhaps I got penalized when the googlebot didn't find some pages? That seems unlikely.

1) So did google implement big changes yesterday? Threads seem to say no but I'm nowhere to be found. What else could be the reason for this? Can anyone give a brief recap of what has happened for neophytes.

2) My site is very popular for its topic but we do not sell goods directly. We are a news site, but we also have many pages with affiliate links to products related to our topic. Nearly all of these pages used to rank very highly. Now I fear they are being penalized. So the question is what can I do? Are affiliate sites going to be out the door even if they are recognized in their field?

3) I've seen some discussion of duplicate content. Can duplicate content relate to items within the same page? If an item came in multiple colors the way I have it set up now is that all of these would be on the same page with the same description but perhaps I am getting a duplicate content penalty for this?

4) Nearly all of my product pages are built using data from my custom database. But the pages themselves are on a template. So I have productpage?product=productnamehere for nearly all of my products. I've seen some reference that I shouldn't have a bunch of pages on the same template. I could create different templates for different brands or use mod_rewrite to change the URL's. Or I could change things up so each page doesn't have a similar title structure. Now the page titles are "Product Name Sale". Does anyone think any of these things would help would help?

5) I got sick of people with norton spam blocker not being able to see my product links (which are viewed as ads I guess) so I started having my outbound links click through another page on my site where I gave a 301 error and sent the viewers to the affiliate landing page? Would this get me in hot water with google? I'd rather lose the norton ad blocker people than 80% of my people because of an honest attempt to help people see my products.

6) Are there any sites where I can pay for professional help on redsigning my site? i'm a legitimate authority on my topic but worried that I may have lost 80% of my search traffic. I'm vaguely familiar with some of the concepts involved but that's it.

Thanks