Well said Wayne!

Google have said that they will reward authority sites providing lots of valuable information such as research, in-depth reports and analysis so if you want to achieve high page rank you will need to have a number of lengthier keyword rich articles. The ideal length is 400 to 600 words.

Not all your posts need to be this long but if you have lots of very short posts the search engines may think your content is thin and penalise you, particularly if you have a lot of ads on your site. We don’t yet know what the ideal ratio is but to be on the safe side I would balance things out by having at least one full length post to every 2 or 3 short posts.

Hi Wendy
I don’t think you need worry in this instance. Essentially you are not creating duplicate product descriptions but merely assigning a single description to multiple product categories using tags. Where you might run into problems is if you are using standard product descriptions and images provided by the manufacturer or third party reviews that a number of other retailers are also using. If that is the case you would be well advised to create your own unique content. Hope that helps!

I have been following the Panda update carefully and it has recently gone live in the UK with pretty much the same results as we saw in the States. Essentially it all comes down to the user experience. Google has harped on about it for years and it has been repeated by SEOs and Marketing guys for so long that we sometimes forget all about.
When you look at your site you have to ask yourself a few questions:
1. If I came here as a user would I be instantly turned off? Excessive and agressive ads certainly turn me off – stand up Ezine articles.
2. Do you provide real, unique and exciting content and information.
3. Do the content on you site warrant a place in the the first page of Google?
4. Will people return to find out other news or information or is this likely to be a one stop visit?
Your site needs to engage, inform and encourage repeat visits. It may be trivialising the hard work that ha gone into the latest Google update – but at the end of the day it was merely a clean up job. Google has swept away all the thin, lame and useless content and buried further down the results – allowing the better information more prominence.
If your site is genuine, if your information is great and unique, if you weren’t firing out content to wrap adverts around…you should have little to worry about.

Great question Donna! Most of my clients have actually benefited from the changes because they have always focused on producing great original content. There is only one that has been badly affected and having put a lot of effort into her blog and video marketing over the past month she has already undone most of the damage with her page rank and traffic recovering to near pre-Panda levels.