Did I get hit with a panda update?

[EcommerceSite]

I have a site that is a marketplace. We don't own any items, the sellers fill everything out and then it goes up on the site. Many of our sellers also have their own sites and just send us a spreadsheet with all of their items and we bulk upload. In that case what we are putting up is very similar to what they already have up on their own site.

I used the Fruition penalty checker and they seem to be suggesting that we got hit with some penalties for Panda and Quality Content. With the Google Algorithm it is hard to know for sure what we got hit with.

Is it possible Google sees us as one of those crappy scraper sites? Is there anything we can do? We never see the items so I can't add to peoples description.

[EcommerceSite]

It isn't like we have no traffic, we still get thousands in organic traffic a day. It just isn't as much as it used to be.

We are the largest in our industry, not near the size of Amazon or Ebay, but still pretty large. So we have customers who exclusively sell through us. Most of our sellers are small business and don't have in house technical teams, so it is easier working with us.

I understand content marketing and we are starting to do that but if we have been hit with Panda I don't know if it matters.

[MarieHaynes]

If your site is selling the same products that many other sites are, then the only way you can expect to rank well is if you are adding significant value that isn't available anywhere else.

It's not enough to say that your added value is the fact that users can find everything in one convenient place.

Let's say that I had an ecommerce store that sold camping equipment. But, everything in my store was also available on many other websites. If someone was searching for a particular type of sleeping bag, for example, why would Google want to show them my store rather than the original merchant?

But, let's say that my page that sells that sleeping bag also offers information such as the following:

-A guide to choosing the sleeping bag

-Unique customer reviews

-A video showing how to roll the bag up

and so on.

Now that I've got some good, helpful content, users may decide that rather than buying the product from the manufacturer they'd like to browse my site and get good helpful information and possibly buy from me.

In the past, you could get away with having a site that simply carried product feeds and you could rank that site well if you built enough links. But, self made links are less and less effective as Google is getting better at figuring out what is legitimate. So now, if you want to rank well, you have to truly have a site that is extremely helpful and unique...not just unique in the words on the page, but unique in the type of value you are offering to others, which is not always an easy task.