[cgingrich]

For sure - I've seen eCommerce sites intentionally bloat category pages with tons of written content for the sake of not appearing thin. That's definitely not the experience that users want. I will say though that I've tended to see a little bit more of objectivity specifically on eComm sites with the algorithm being more forgiving on sheer volume of content (though not in this case).

It's definitely hard and algorithms will get better with time as Google understands more and more of the web, but in the meantime, give us a heads up so we can fix it :)

[bhartzer]

Intentionally bloating category pages with tons of written content, unfortunately, is the result of Panda. Sure it's not good for users, but that's what happened, simply because those ecommerce sites had to adapt if they were going to compete or have a leg up over their competition.

And I'm not sure if Google took that into consideration when they launched Panda. If they had, we wouldn't be seeing the intentional bloat.

[bhartzer]

The same exact thing happened when Google launched Penguin. I bet Google didn't realize that they would start a whole new industry, the shady industry of making site owners pay money to get low quality links removed. But I digress...