The Panda updates do seem kinda arbitrary and they sure can hit hard. There is not much you can do to protect yourself from future updates.
Protect yourself with original content... the first page of results are still in Google if you have a look... it's not like the top 10 results have disappeared from Google... Google just puts quality there...
Shit content, duplicate content, shit sites, boring sites, Made For Adsense sites and sites that offer nothing in General are getting the slap by Panda... If it's made for the soul purpose of displaying ad's and making money - then it's gonna feel a punch. Google wont penalize you for linking to relevant and quality pages or sites. Google wont penalize you for ad placement above the fold... Google does that themselves.
my rankings went high after we have some revisions on our contents. and we do it per page. i think i will better use article submission and directories, maybe it could help.
Dang.. My traffic down 20% since 20th January. I believe it related to page layout which posted on Google blog.