Planet13 - 7:32 pm on Jun 26, 2011 (gmt 0)

In e-commerce, who is the authority site?

I don't know if this will work for you, but for our ecommerce site that sells brand name products, getting a link from the manufacturer's site (who doesn't sell retail) has been a boost.

I am tempted but with Panda, going to hold off.

Well, nobody knows for sure, but Panda seems to be a different animal.

Panda seems to deal with on-page content. the Sites that are said to be the big losers were primarily content farms, and google has said that panda would be targeting "shallow" content.

There might have been other changes made by the spam team at google to the algo that is changing the way off-page factors (like inbound links from external sites, or even internal linking practices) are handled. But if it is, it is PROBABLY separate from Panda.