Panda & Low Value Pages

I noticed a couple of my sites had dropped in ranking but could not understand why.


One of my website which targets a very low competition keyword phrase & has an exact match domain was holding strong in the number one spot.


However I checked in on it last nigh & it's dropped to page 2. All the content on the site is unique & I have a few back links from blog posts on topic relevant sites.


I just could not understand why the site had dropped. After reading a little more about the recent Google Panda update I read that a "Low Value Page" on a site can affect the whole sites rankings.


So I had a look through the pages on my site to weed out any low value pages. I had one page which was a product comparison table, just rows of products which said "yes" or "no" about certain features.


The table had affiliate links embedded into a button & picture of the product. Now what I'm thinking is if Google craws this page it just looks like a page full of affiliate links with no content. - Could this damage my sites rankings?


So now I'm thinking about other pages like the "easy privacy policy" page plugin that everyone uses & my short "about us" page. These would be perceived as "low value pages" by Google & could affect my whole site.


Is this true that if I have one or two extremely low quality pages that they can affect the ranking of the whole site?


This sounds a little crazy to me, so if someone builds a site with the best content ever written on it but adds one poor page then the whole site will be affected, surely this can't be true?