Duplicate Product Page Descriptions

[phyc]

I have a supplement site and the descriptions for the products were provided by the manufactures. However, most of my competitors also have the same description for the products. Could this be affecting my product’s ranking if there are already a handful of sites that have that same description?

If so would re-wording or altering the descriptions of existing pages possibly help improve my ranking or has those pages been marked as duplicate and it’s too late.

[vangogh]

I think it will depend on how similar the overall page is. If you have 6 products on a page and a competitor also has 6 products on a page, but only 2 of them are the same product the page probably won't be seen as duplicate content. If all 6 are the same products then it might be considered duplicate. I suspect search engines look a little beyond the content itself when deciding if pages are duplicate, but that's my just opinion and not necessary fact.

It's certainly not too late to make changes and making changes to the text will help. The more you can change the less likely it will be considered duplicate. I'm not sure if there's a specific percentage of text you would need to change, but the more the better.