How to handle duplicate content with Bible verses
-
Have a friend that does a site with bible verses and different peoples thoughts or feelings on them. Since I'm an SEO he came to me with questions and duplicate content red flag popped up in my head. My clients all generate their own content so not familiar with this world. Since Bible verses appear all over the place, is there a way to address this from an SEO standpoint to avoid duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks so much everyone. Not only was it all very helpful, it was very fast. Thanks and have a great day.
-
Hi,
When quoting sources, we use the blockquote tag.
Information here: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_blockquote.asp
It tells Google that 'yes, I know this isn't original, it comes from here'.
Best of luck,
Amelia
-
Your friend has to give Google a reason to send searchers to his website instead of the many well-known authority sites that have the same verses. Is he providing a lot of unique commentary, or are the pages mostly bible verses that can be found on thousands of other sites? If it's the former, then he should be okay. If it's the latter, he may want to focus on adding more unique content.
-
Hi Jeremy,
Welcome to the Moz community!
That's an interesting position to be in. On one hand, Bible verses do not change and you may want to include the verse on your page. However, that copy is most certainly around the web and can easily be identified as duplicate content.
One strategy could be:
-
Make each verse its own page, if the verse is length then try to break up the verse between multiple pages
-
On each page, expand upon the verse.
-
What information from each verse is important to the reader, explain it in plain language
-
Include an interpretation of the verse and key components of the verse
-
Explain how the verse is applicable through real world examples and experience
You can probably see the theme above - expand upon the non-original content with original content through interpretation and experience. You definitely want to outweigh the duplicate content for each verse.
If you're only trying to create an archive of the verse, then you may want to create a special area of your site that includes the original verse and have that noindexed from the search engines, to prevent any duplicate content penalties.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Shall we add engaging and useful FAQ content in all our pages or rather not because of duplication and reduction of unique content?
We are considering to add at the end of alll our 1500 product pages answers to the 9 most frequently asked questions. These questions and answers will be 90% identical for all our products and personalizing them more is not an option and not so necessary since most questions are related to the process of reserving the product. We are convinced this will increase engagement of users with the page, time on page and it will be genuinely useful for the visitor as most visitors will not visit the seperate FAQ page. Also it will add more related keywords/topics to the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
On the downside it will reduce the percentage of unique content per page and adds duplication. Any thoughts about wether in terms of google rankings we should go ahead and benefits in form of engagement may outweight downside of duplication of content?0 -
Duplicate content across different domains in different countries?
Hi Guys, We have a 4 sites One in NZ, UK, Canada and Australia. All geo-targeting their respective countries in Google Search Console. The sites are identical. We recently added the same content to all 4 sites. Will this cause duplicate content issues or any issues even though they are in different countries and geo-targeting is set? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar0 -
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Medical / Health Content Authority - Content Mix Question
Greetings, I have an interesting challenge for you. Well, I suppose "interesting" is an understatement, but here goes. Our company is a women's health site. However, over the years our content mix has grown to nearly 50/50 between unique health / medical content and general lifestyle/DIY/well being content (non-health). Basically, there is a "great divide" between health and non-health content. As you can imagine, this has put a serious damper on gaining ground with our medical / health organic traffic. It's my understanding that Google does not see us as an authority site with regard to medical / health content since we "have two faces" in the eyes of Google. My recommendation is to create a new domain and separate the content entirely so that one domain is focused exclusively on health / medical while the other focuses on general lifestyle/DIY/well being. Because health / medical pages undergo an additional level of scrutiny per Google - YMYL pages - it seems to me the only way to make serious ground in this hyper-competitive vertical is to be laser targeted with our health/medical content. I see no other way. Am I thinking clearly here, or have I totally gone insane? Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
Complicated Duplicate Content Question...but it's fun, so please help.
Quick background: I have a page that is absolutely terrible, but it has links and it's a category page so it ranks. I have a landing page which is significantly - a bizillion times - better, but it is omitted in the search results for the most important query we need. I'm considering switching the content of the two pages, but I have no idea what they will do. I'm not sure if it will cause duplicate content issues or what will happen. Here are the two urls: Terrible page that ranks (not well but it's what comes up eventually) https://kemprugegreen.com/personal-injury/ Far better page that keeps getting omitted: https://kemprugegreen.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-attorney/ Any suggestions (other than just wait on google to stop omitting the page, because that's just not going to happen) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Duplicate content, the distrubutors are copying the content of the manufacturer
Hi everybody! While I was checking all points of the Technical Site Audit Checklist 2015 (great checklist!), I found that the distrubutors of my client are copying part of the content to add it in their websites. When I take a content snippet, and put it in quotes and search for it I get four or five sites that have copied the content. They are distributors of my client. The first result is still my client (the manufacturer), but... should I recommend any action to this situation. We don't want to bother the distributors with obstacles. This situation could be a problem or is it a common situation and Google knows perfectly where the content is comming from? Any recommendation? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
Duplicate Content On A Subdomain
Hi, We have a client who is currently close to completing a site specifically aimed at the UK market (they're doing this in-house so we've had no say in how it will work). The site will almost be a duplicate (in terms of content, targeted keywords etc.) of a section of the main site (that sits on the root domain) - the main site is targeted toward the US. The only difference will be certain spellings and currency type. If this new UK site were to sit on a sub domain of the main site, which is a .com, will this cause duplicate content issues? I know that there wouldn't be an issue if the new site were to be on a separate .co.uk domain (according to Matt Cutts), but it looks like the client wants it to be on a sub domain. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasarrow0