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Had that on one of our pages, we then crashed completely, lost ranking on a number of other keywords, currently looking for the cause, but i believe google is doing some sort of gradual update.

I completely agree with Marisa - I have an e-commerce site that recently went through a re-design and it now has drop down navigation for the sub-categories which makes the site more user friendly, but it also increased the links on the page significantly and SEOMoz issued this warning. However rankings are better than ever and this was a logical step in good user interface design, making it as easy as possible to get to the information the visitor is looking for in the fewest clicks.

Facebook used to do something similar for external links. I think it all depends on how their script redirects to the destination website. Try putting the link into a redirect checker and see if it's using a 301 redirect or not.

With the caveat that this is a 7-yo thread -- I'd say that it's generally more of a filter these days (vs. a Capital-P penalty). The OEM or large resellers are almost always going to win these battles, and you'll be at a disadvantage if you duplicate their product descriptions word-for-word. Can you still rank? Sure, but you're going to have an easier time if you can add some original value. If you aren't allowed to modify the info, is there anything you can add to it -- custom reviews (not from users, but say an editorial-style review), for example? You don't have to do it for thousands of products. You could start with ten or 25 top sellers and see how things go.