Duplicate Legal Content

[irnikij]

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.

[TheUniqueSEO]

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.

[mememax]

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.

[irnikij]

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!