Duplicate Legal Content
-
Oftentimes lawyer websites will publish laws (codes, statutes, regulations, case law, etc). They add no value to the text, it's just copy pasted. Therefore, the same text/content may be on potentially hundreds of websites. Does google interpret this as duplicate content, or does it recognize government content as special?
I want to have the laws on my website as well, however I am debating whether to add no follow tags or not. Or I'm thinking about adding value to the content by breaking down the specific law. However, even then at least 50% of the content on the page will still be the law, and I'm not sure if that is enough to be considered duplicate content.
-
Thank you for the responses. I think I'm going to add value to the content and not worry so much about duplication. Thanks again!
-
Hi Nikhil, it's normal that you're worried about this kind of things, that's one of the consequences panda got into this market. It's good that you worry about it, there two different approaches to this: try to trick it or understand it and add some real value to that content. This issue is not only in your niche. Think about books, films and lyrics of songs. You can't change them, howeveryou can add something to make that content more useful for google to le t you rank for it.
I'm not a lawyer but I'll try to make an example. The first result will be the official result then you may write an article which takes that law and then add some bullet points of the main aspects of that law, then the related laws, adding bolds, commentaries and things like this. You won't be first but you'll start building your brand as the site giving real value added to that laws, something that some people may think you're valuable and google too.
Don't worry about duplication in this case, as I said before, lyrics sites got a lot of that content and they're not duplicates, try to open your page to more keywords than only the text of that specific law.
I hope that would be useful.
-
Hey There
I would say if you think the content will be useful for your visitors/customers then add it. If you are wanting to add the content to attract new browsers through the SERPs then you are out of luck. As you say the content is not unique, so you are unlikely to be attributed as the source/original author of the content.
I don't think (although someone will come along and put me in my place) you will be penalised for adding the content, you just won't receive any SERP boost for it.
But as I say, if it helps your customers, then go ahead and add it.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content marketing ideas from the Moz community?
I want to borrow you ideas/experience. I have a page that is ranking #7 in New Zealand. It's the most profitable course I sell. I want to support it with related articles/posts to potentially help it rank better. **I'd love some ideas. ** Page: http://www.bringyourownlaptop.co.nz/web-design-courses.html
Content Development | | danlovesadobe
Keyword: Web Design Courses.0 -
Duplicate Content Discovery
I was hit with Penguin on April 24th like a ton of bricks. Luckily my cash cow keyword was kept safe and still is today with even an increase in traffic over the year. With some other main keywords I used to rank far I fell off the board on that day. Since then I have been slowly trying to clean things up as much as I know Today I was sitting down with my coffee and Penguin mindset and I decided to use copyscape again to review duplicate content issues and something I noticed which I either didn't before or didn't think was an issue was my footer. In my footer I used a blurb from some other site in my niche a long time ago. Which I discovered they used from one of the main sites in my niche. Anyways I noticed that my footer is what kept coming up as being duplicate content and was always at an overage of 28% according to copyscape. My question is should I be worried about the footer? Is 28% a lot?
Content Development | | cbielich0 -
Prevent average users from copying content and pasting into their websites
Please do not respond with a "you can't stop them" comment, I understand this. Most of our pages have content that is duplicated across multiple domains. The recent Google algorithm update focused on penalizing pages that have duplicate content, and it could be one of the reasons that we have been seeing traffic loss. I'm looking for some type of javascsript/php code that will help minimize this issue.If could be code that does not allow you to copy and paste the code without turning of javascript or a dialog box pops up and says "this content is copyright protected, anyone copying this content is subject to legal action" I've found one script that might work http://www.ioncube.com/html_encoder.php My questions are still the same: 1 What is the best method to achieve my objective? 2 Will this additional code affect how the webbots see our site and or affect rankings? I know that anyone can figure out how to get the code, I am trying to mitigate by providing a warning about copyright infringement and making it more challenging to copy our content. Please do not respond with a "you can't stop them" comment, etc, I understand this. Thank you for your comments!
Content Development | | 4RealLocal0 -
Content writters needed
Good Morning from 14 degrees C light showers & rain wetherby UK 🙂 Ok I'm getting really frustrated with clients inability to ad content so much so its time to go round the problem and find an outsource solution. So my question is please: 1. Can anyone recommend a contnet writting resource
Content Development | | Nightwing
2. Whats reasonable rates to expect Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Can having similar content on my company's two sites hurt our rankings?
We have a very successful website that has been up for a number of years (www.comellaortho.com). We rank high in the natural rankings for that site. A few months ago, we started seeing patients in another nearby city. I purchased a new domain name, www.dansvilleortho.com, and had our web company duplicate the website under the new domain name. The reality is that the content on these two sites are nearly identical. Some of the pages are different; for example, there are fewer pages on the new site. But the pages that do exist are nearly identical. My question is: Can having similar content on my company's two sites hurt our rankings? Based on what I've read thus far, I believe the answer is "Yes". However, I'm curious how bad this may hurt us. I'm not as worried about the new site (dansvilleortho.com) because our competition in that city is slim to none. But I AM worried about harming the original site/business (comellaortho.com). Which site(s) rankings may be affected by this, and if so, how bad? Thank you.
Content Development | | comellortho0 -
Content Estimates
Are there any SEO Content writers that can create several pages for me on a post- graduate level for a target audience of physicians? Writing should be informative regarding our company and also optimized for keywords. I only have one quote so far from a company outside of SEOMoz and I was hoping to get someone on this site that had some experience in this area. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Content Development | | Boodreaux0 -
Help with Content Revamp
Many years ago we wrote about 60 content pages for our surfboard e-commerce website targeting all the top popular keywords. Many of them generic but very keyword focused. We are now revamping our content our our site and want to move away from the generic side of things and actually rewrite all the pages to make them very useful and actually stuff our customers can really use and will find very helpful. I noticed that many times we wrote small pages less than 500 words that target similar keywords around a general theme. In looking at the analytics all the pages are getting a good amount of traffic and ranking well but im wondering would it be ok to focus on a main topic and combine similar pages if they are related? So i can take the say 60 articles and combine it down to say 10 articles and make the articles cover alot more stuff instead of just being small 500 word articles. As an example we have many surfboard models so we wrote an article for -Longboard Surfboards -Funboard Surfboards -Mini Malibu Surfboards -Retro Fish Surfboards -Womens Surfboards -Beginner Surfboards My question is could i weave these all together and write one long guide on say "Choosing The Type of Surboard you need" and cover all the board models in that article and then redirect the old pages to point to that one article. Would i still rank well for all these words Or would this destroy all my current rankings for these words? What is the best approach to rewriting and or combining old content pages that currently rank well but could be combined with others around the same theme to make it more user friendly?
Content Development | | isle_surf0 -
How can I use my unique content to my advantage?
Hi, I run http://ablemagazine.co.uk - we also put out a print magazine every 2 months (the biggest disability magazine in Britain) This means we have loads of unique content (around 30 feature stories and 30 news stories every 2 months) Just wondering how I can use this to my advantage? I've been social bookmarking the feature stories (reddit, etc) and a link to all my unique stuff on facebook/twitter. Just wondering if there's anything else I should be doing? Thanks
Content Development | | craven220