Most people got mortally wounded by it? I'm not seeing that. For the 500+ sites that I monitor on a regular basis, I'm not seeing that being the case.

Are you referring to the description above, Bill? It says "Mostly because a lot of people got mortally wounded by it." -- doesn't say "most people".

This reminds me of the previously Sphunn article "Why I Intend to Stop Adding Junk to the Web" (http://sphinn.com/story/214117).  It's interesting to see how some passive income professionals are feeling the Panda Slap more deeply than others.  That seems to further discount the view that Panda went after passive income sites in general while at the same time underscoring the emphasis that certain techniques and/or assumptions received from Panda.

This post is slightly funny to me since the affiliate websites I work on were helped by Panda and article websites that produce unique quality content with loads of links where hit the hardest. It seems everybody has a different theory on Panda, none seem to be completely right.

I think there is still much to be uncovered about the Panda Update, but I do know that none of our clients were affected negatively by the update. Several of our sites even jumped several ranks seemingly overnight. Whether that was coincidence or not is still yet to be determined. In the meantime I think that continuing to focus on best practice white hat techniques is a solid bet.

Some people say that Google has identified a lot of what we call "verticals" -- the query sets that address specific markets or topics -- and the emerging picture from Panda seems to be that all the verticals have been divided into "Pandalyzed" and "non-Pandalyzed" sites.

This division-across-verticals is, in my opinion, most likely just due to the statistical probability that every type of site can be sorted by the (Panda) hat and that neither Google nor Panda needs to focus on "verticals".

Still, these anecdotes make you wonder why some affiliates were hurt and why some were not.  If I had an affiliate site that had been hurt, I would be looking at the affiliate sites that are doing better.