I have an ecommerce website that sells outdoor apparel for men and women, mostly hunting, fishing and camping gear so it's a bit of a niche but not really too much. I have quite a few products that I sell on the site but none of them are exclusive to me, which I'm beginning to think is an issue.
My website fell from the bottom of page 1 for many keywords, page 2 and 3 for others, to way way down in the SERPs, especially for some of my main products. The only thing I can think of is that there are at least 15 - 20 other websites that sell these same products and I have to believe that we all use the same content, descriptions etc for all of them. Our checkout services and most of the other content is obviously different so I never thought that using manufacturer information for the products could ever possibly get us in trouble with Google but I think it did.
And it's no coincidence that this huge problem came just after one of the most recent Panda updates? Short of rewriting pages and pages of product information and re-designing our pages, what do I do to get rid of this penalty?
How PBG Would Handle This Problem