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I experienced a similar issue recently. Upon closer inspection I noticed there were duplicate canonical tags on the pages. Google actually ignores ALL if there are more than one. So I would certainly double check that.

Hello SEOMoz Team,

My organization is making a push to have a seamless navigation across all of its domains.  Each of the domains publishes distinctly different content about various subjects.  We want each of the domains to have its own separate identity as viewed by Google.  It has been suggested internally that we keep the exact same navigation structure (40-50 links in the header) across the header of each of our 15 domains to ensure "unity" among all of the sites.  Will this create a problem with duplicate content in the form of the menu structure, and will this cause Google to not consider the domains as being separate from each other?

Thanks,

Richard Robbins

Others may have some better resources, but these have been helpful to me:

for IIS servers: http://bit.ly/kPlYVQ

for Apache: http://bit.ly/j83UGO

Hopefully those are still relevant guides.  It's been a year or so since I've used them, but still had them in my bookmarks!

So you're saying it would not be a good idea to try and get every verse url listed in Google?  Perhaps we could try adding a canonical tag to point the the chapter only?  For example, browsing the site you can't actually navigate to http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5?lang=eng.  You can only navigate to /james/1?lang=eng.  However, the other URLs exist when someone links externally to a specific chapter and verse.  The code on the page will highlight the desired verse.  In our example the entire chapter exists on its own url and the content is unique.

Your suggestion may work if we just canonicalize all those "verse" urls like /james/1.5?lang=eng and james/1.5-10?lang=eng to /james/1?lang=eng.  Some of the more popular verses with great page authority could actually help prop up the rest of the content on the page.

My concern though is that MUCH of the scripture related traffic comes through queries of the exact chapter/verse reference.  So I can see where having individual pages for each passage could be valuable for rankings.  But that user experience is poor when someone wants to see a range of passages like ch 5 vs 1-4 or similar.  So we are looking for the best way to get our URLs indexed and ranked as individual passages or ranges of passages that are popular on search engines.

I can tell you that this section was not hit by the Panda update.  The content is not "thin" as could be the case if we put each verse on a single page.

The ?lang=eng parameter is how we handle language versions.  We have the scriptures online in several languages.  I'm sure there are better ways to handle that as well.  Due to the size of the organization we're certainly trying to get the low hanging fruit out of the way first.

We have our complete set of scriptures online, including the Bible at http://lds.org/scriptures.  Users can browse to any of the volumes of scriptures. We've improved the user experience by allowing users to link to specific verses in context which will scroll to and highlight the linked verse.  However, this creates a significant amount of duplicate content.  For example, these links:

http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5

http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5-10

http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1

All of those will link to the same chapter in the book of James, yet the first two will highlight the verse 5 and verses 5-10 respectively.  This is a good user experience because in other sections of our site and on blogs throughout the world webmasters link to specific verses so the reader can see the verse in context of the rest of the chapter.

Another bible site has separate html pages for each verse individually and tends to outrank us because of this (and possibly some other reasons) for long tail chapter/verse queries.  However, our tests indicated that the current version is preferred by users.

We have a sitemap ready to publish which includes a URL for every chapter/verse.  We hope this will improve indexing of some of the more popular verses.  However, Googlebot is going to see some duplicate content as it crawls that sitemap!

So the question is: is the sitemap a good idea realizing that we can't revert back to including each chapter/verse on its own unique page?  We are also going to recommend that we create unique titles for each of the verses and pass a portion of the text from the verse into the meta description.  Will this perhaps be enough to satisfy Googlebot that the pages are in fact unique? They certainly are from a user perspective.

Thanks all for taking the time!

Thanks for the plugin resource.  Unfortunately we are not on Wordpress.  We have an enterprise CMS and I haven't found out if it can generate a video sitemap for us yet or not.

I've been seeing a lot of people recommend creating a video sitemap or Media RSS feed (mRSS) and submit to Google.  We have videos hosted on Brightcove and most on YouTube.  Brightcove can generate the sitemap for us.  But does anyone know how to generate a YouTube Video Sitemap for those videos embedded on our pages?

Note:  I realize I could manually assemble the video sitemap, however manually assembling the sitemap is probably not an option for us due to the volume of videos we've published.

We recently setting up 301 redirects from one of our sites so that the site redirects from the www version to the non-www version for all pages.  We want to quantify what we expect to see as results.  From what the experts say, we'd expect that the Page Authority of the canonical versio (non-www) will be higher than either of the two separate ones were previously.  For instance, if this page - www.website.com/information/ - had a PA of 57 and this one - website.com/information/ - had a PA of 53, some time after the 301 redirects from www to non-www have been put into place, we should see the non-www version of that page move up to some PA about 57.  It our thinking correct?  How long does it normally take to see a PA update take place in a scenario like this?

Thanks,

Richard

I've been seeing a lot of people recommend creating a video sitemap or Media RSS feed (mRSS) and submit to Google.  We have videos hosted on Brightcove and most on YouTube.  Brightcove can generate the sitemap for us.  But does anyone know how to generate a YouTube Video Sitemap for those videos embedded on our pages?

Note:  I realize I could manually assemble the video sitemap, however manually assembling the sitemap is probably not an option for us due to the volume of videos we've published.