Will syndicated content hurt a website's ranking potential?

[copyjack]

I work with a number of independent insurance agencies across the United States. All of these agencies have setup their websites through one preferred insurance provider.

The websites are customizable to a point, but the content for the entire website is mostly the same. Therefore, literally hundreds of agency sites have essentially the same content. The only thing that changes is a few "wildcards" in the copy where the agency fills in their city, state, services areas, company history, etc.

My questions is: will this syndicated content hurt their ranking potential? I've been toying with the idea of further editing the content to make it more unique to an agency, but I would hate to waste a lot of hours doing this if it won't help anything. Would you expect this approach to be beneficial or a waste of time?

Thank you for your help!

[Debdulal]

I can understand your dilemma. If I say you to rewrite all these pages, it will be an uphill battle for you but if you do not do this, you will leave the all these insurance agents sites and the main website at large. Now, if you feel that the rewriting the all these pages overweigh the risk involved, go ahead and do this. No more wasting time mate J

[MarieHaynes]

This is exactly the type of thing that will be affected drastically by Panda.  In Google's eyes they don't want to show the same content over and over again to searchers so they will choose what they think is the original and put the rest in supplemental results.  If a site has enough duplicate content on it then it can get flagged as a Panda site and the entire site (not just the duplicated pages) will suffer greatly.

There are some solutions:

-add a noindex tag to the pages

-add a canonical tag pointing to the original source

-totally rewrite each page for each company