Penguin
I suffered too, getting knocked off page one having maintained top 5 slots for a number of search terms for a number of years. Initial changes way back in Feb/March saw it disappear but I've been working on it since and it has crawled back from page 42 to page 2. No manual penalty, so all to do with quality I guess and links. The problem with affiliates is finding the value add on something that's been churned over thousands of times. My biggest issue with Penguin is that the site that is now in the number one spot is an affiliate site with very poor content and layout and 95% of the incoming links are from a single site......it really makes chasing this Penguin very difficult. I do agree entirely that search results are worse since the Penguin though....glad to see Googles profits drop 20%, they better sort it out or Yahoo might just take over as number one search engine again.