Huge discussion tonight..
One thing I noticed is that Panda is somehow after all websites with a certain Adsense ID. It might not be the same for everyone, but it was for me and others.
2 of my websites been hit on 28 September. One survived the second Panda 2.6 update, but the second one was hit and lost all its traffic on 11 October. No, it's not temporary, Panda is after internet marketers in a way or another. Panda is after websites that don't have social likes and comments.
People don't understand that unique content with perfect spelling is not the solution to the users most of the time. Most of the time when I search something in Google I find pages that have good content, but they don't answer my question because they are made for search engines, not for humans.
You have to ask yourself: is my website made for search engines or humans? I my website a small or huge content farm with the only goal of cheating the search engine and making some money, more or less? I have to admit, my second website that was hit on 28 September and 11 October was made for search engines and monetized with Adsense. It was not made for humans. It looked good, good spelling, but all with fluff content, nothing more.
Now, what's quality? Quality is content written for the user. If your site is a collection of content for search engines, even if your content is 10k words, your content is not quality, it's thin. Making your website more user friendly won't help. You need to make your website for your users, because they are PAYING YOU, not Google, but your users. If you give your users content made for search engines, they won't pay you anymore, and that's Panda about, about your users.
SOCIAL MATTERS - websites with comments and Facebook likes and Tweets rank. Facebook pages rank - because they are the most social. Blogspot and Youtube rank because they are Social networks. EMD rank because of BRAND term.
LINKS - don't matter. You can have a bad website without links and can have the same bad website with links. No difference.
Content freshness - is not important as long you don't add good content. Engaging content.
If Google puts bad websites and EMD to test their traffic, if it puts them in the first place it knows they have bad traffic, right?