After-Panda SEO for intermediary businesses

What we definitely know about Phantom and Panda Updates:

• Phantom and Panda updates are about onpage quality, whatever it might mean;)
• Duplicated content fraction of a given page is one of the most important factors, which rank a page down
• Duplicated content can be easy measured

SERPs disintermediation - Google battles intermediaries

There is a Federal trade Comission's report, about how Google misuses its prevalence to kick off intermediary players from some search verticals, like comparison sites or aggregated shopping, where sites sell products from different manufacturers.

Google means, intermediary businesses are poachers and steal Google's money. Google means, SERP is the place for users to see original manufacturers or direct service provider. SERP should be not the place for intermediary services, cause they are secondary. And the sign of secondarity is easy to measure: it is the fact of presence and the proportion of the duplicated content.

The intermediary job to compare and to aggregate stuff and user voice would belong only to Google, because only Google were good, honest, and, last, but not least, it doesn't offer duplicated content - it's just a search engine, not?
Google is a strong rival, playing by own rules. But do you still want to survive this battle?

Condition of intermediary business website

What is the onpage similarity of all intermediary sites?

• Sites of online intermediary business mostly compare something: prices, quality, user experience etc.
• The nature of such intermediary business sites is a list. A list of products, services and their descriptions, which are the same or pretty similar and are delivered by product manufacturers.

Lets look on any typical website, which sells or compares something, i.e. online games:

• it has a category pages, i.e. /games-with-animals/, containing
• a unique category description,
• a games list, containing linked titles and descriptions, where title links are leading to the game details pages,
• and user voice, like reviews and ratings.

The second category page, i.e. /games-with-horses/, contains a unique category description too, but the biggest part of the whole page content, games titles and descriptions, are pretty similar, i. e. 70% with the titles and descriptions from the category /games-with-animals/. It means, the proportion of unique content to duplicated content is ca. 1/3 to 2/3.

What we experienced with previous quality updates

Until the first Panda update arrived, such pages ranked well, nearly without of unique category description.

Then, after the first Panda, such sites could rank only with substantial amount of unique category description text, but the proportion 1/3 to 2/3 was enough to rank well.

New SEO world for intermediary businesses

My crystal glass sphere predicts:
to survive and rank after the Panda, which is know running in the wild, intermediary business sites should

• dispense with duplicated content on category pages altogether, absolutely,
• pitilessly kick off from index every single one thin content page

Note: any single piece of duplicate content or thin content page may and will be used against you!