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I've seen Barry's post, however he doesn't cite an actual source or release.  While I do enjoy Barry's site I don't really trust information from an unnamed, unofficial source.  Does anyone have a release saying it?

I'm glad my rankings are not suffering but still begs the question why? And what day?

I'm sure a few people have been asking this direct question throughout the forums but most of them are masked by indirect questions like "my traffic has dipped" and the like.  Does anyone have a firm confirmation that Panda has hit?

My indication that it has hit is that I'm experiencing a ~%30 increase in traffic to my e-commerce client from organic searches after this past weekend.  We haven't made any significant changes to content besides daily postings, but even that doesn't account for a %30 spike that has maintained for 3 days straight.

So again, what have you guys experienced?  Anything to support this?

Well in the short term your website would increase in rank and increase your traffic.  As time goes on though - Google would eventually see the pattern as it does with mimes and decrease, not only your pagerank, but also your domain authority as a result of the link spamming from low quality sites.  The longer the page remains with low quality links and poor SEO practices, the more and more likely it is that it will be penalized or even black listed.

Does not recommend.

The majority of focus these days seems to be on Google.  This leaves Bing to fall by the wayside, but I do understand why.  Has anyone found any good reference material on Bing and why the amount of pages they index is substantially less than Google?

while the sitemaps were submitted to Google and Bing around the same time, my client has ~165,000 / 202,000 pages indexed on Google and ~7,500 / 202,000 on Bing.  Can anyone explain what's going on here or has no real research been done into the area?

Completely agree with Ryan, as an in-house SEO of a company with hundreds of thousands of pages I can guarantee you that not every page you have will be indexed via your sitemaps.  The best thing to do is just use the tips that Ryan stated above.  Link earning or content building, content building being the easier of the two.

Rand posted a nice video a while back on Whiteboard Fridays' about the effects of out linking.  The basic jist of it is that you can link out to quality domains without any real benefit or being penalized - however - if you like to poor quality domains then it reflects poorly upon you.

Sorry I can't find the link right now, I'll post it up if I find it!

The tool that I use to check is an add-on for Chrome called "Page Speed"- super helpful in analyzing page load times and gives suggestions on how to fix these errors. I believe they have an add-on for Firefox as well.

I'm fairly confident that a crawler will rate the links and information it comes across first as a higher priority than links further down the page.  I don't see how putting more relevant content higher on the page and sorting out the placement with CSS could really hurt anything, so it's definitely worth a try!

I don't quite get what you're asking.  Are you asking about how to code in HTML, what languages to use, or how to properly lay out a theme to a website?

Most people now-a-days use some sort of Content-Management System as a backend for their site, to add and edit content, while updating the theme using html and php.   To get started I would suggest reading some tutorials on how to begin coding in HTML then move on to LAMP development.  A lot can be included in this topic!

Really, Google can do whatever they want.  They have no authority to answer to when it comes to penalizing sites.  From past experience, buying links isn't the worst thing you can do... as long as you have sites with high DA linking to you as well.  If you don't then you're more likely to be penalized for having a lot of low quality links to you.

Buying links is never endorsed though, earning a good ranking through old fashioned hard work is by far the best way to achieve lasting results.

The problem that I have with CMS side sitemap generators is that it often pulls content from pages that are existing and adds entries based off that information.  If you have pages linked to that are no longer there, as is the case with dynamic content, then you'll be imposing 404's on yourself like crazy.

Just something to watch out for but it's probably your best solution.

As Joseph said, using a 301 redirect will not be tracked as a referral but instead will be direct.  Taking over a company with many indexed pages can be time consuming but as he said, over time your authority and in links will be improved.