Plagiarism is an offense and search engines can penalize bloggers over it. Plagiarism free content is the backbone of a good SEO strategy.
Search engines like Google always prefer the originality of the content. They have special crawlers and software to measure the authenticity of the content.
Software such as a plagiarism checker helps a content writer to identify plagiarism in their content and lets you prepare plagiarism free content.
Checking plagiarism is not a time-wasting habit.
When you check for plagiarism, it makes you conscious of this practice.
The originality of the content makes a website favorite for most search engines.
In this article, we will learn more about plagiarism in SEO, what does Google think of plagiarism, and how to keep your website safe from plagiarism.
Definition of Plagiarism
The definition of plagiarism according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is:
To present others’ work as your own without crediting the source or not properly giving the citation of the work.
Plagiarism is stealing ideas from one or several content and rephrasing them to prepare a new content.
Google and Plagiarism Free Content
Google hates plagiarism. Content that Google ranks should be unique, original, user-friendly, accessible, and fast to load.
Even if you copy ideas from other content and rephrase it as your own, Google will recognize it.
These characteristics make Google one of the finest search engines of all.
Related: What To Do If Your Web Content Gets Plagiarised
The originality of the content is crucial for the ranking of a website for a longer period.
Therefore, you should always check your content for plagiarism before publishing.
Plagiarism Free Content is the King
There are two major factors of ranking in the search engines. The first is plagiarism free content and the second is links. Content still remains the king.
You should prepare content that helps the user. The content should be your own, all the ideas mentioned in the article should not be copied from other references. It’s okay to research content but it’s not okay to steal ideas.
If the content is not original and informative, then your SEO campaign won’t generate the desired results.
Related: How to Fix Duplicate Content Issues
An SEO campaign can only magnify the content, it can’t change the originality of the content you are campaigning for.
This means SEO and content boost each other.
Website Ranking and Plagiarized Content
Sites that consistently produce fresh and plagiarism free content rank at the top of the search engines.
Original and informative content earns the #1 position in Google.
A website having plagiarized content, and ideas can never be the market leaders in the long run.
Innovative content and ideas should form the basic of your content marketing strategy.
Brands that emphasize innovative and unique content outrank their competitors on Google.
The incentive is huge for a brand to rank themselves on the first page of Google on a regular basis.
Related: The Top Plagiarism Checkers
When a website ranks on the first page of Google, it can fetch much more traffic. The chances of sale and purchase enhance tremendously.
Never steal ideas, be always innovative and creative!
Quality of Content and SEO
Google has listed special guidelines for preparing user-friendly and plagiarism free content. For any SEO campaign to succeed, you should always pay attention to content. If the content is high-quality then half the job is already done.
You should avoid the following techniques:
- Creating doorway pages.
- Preparing scraped content.
- Stealing images from other sites.
- Stealing content and ideas from other sites without proper attribution.
- Producing automatically generated content.
- Creating pages with duplicate content.
- Creating content with little original content.
- Adding sneaky redirects, hidden text, or hidden links in the content.
- Cloaking and abusing the structured data markup.
Related: The Secret of Quality Content
You should follow the best practices for producing quality content:
- Write original content on the topic that is not found anywhere on the web.
- Always cite your sources and give proper attribution.
- Write for the users and not for the search engines.
- Check your content for plagiarism.
- Check your content for grammatical errors.
- Make your content easy to scan.
- Make your webpage fast to load.
Related: Best Examples of Content Writing
Importance of Citation
Proper citation is important to avoid plagiarism.
Whenever you sit down to write content, it’s obvious that you will read other resources and use some of the stats or quotes or snippets in your content.
When you do that, always cite them. If you are looking for an example to follow then you can visit Wikipedia. Just look at the pages of Wikipedia and how they organize content. Every line is properly referenced.
Content that has proper citations is liked by search engines.
Content and Reputation of a Brand
The originality of the content produced by an organization is important for its reputation.
In this age of digitalization, plagiarized content and articles can undermine the firm’s efforts.
Related: How to Prepare Quality Content
Plagiarized content may also harm the integrity of an organization.
The website tagged as presenting plagiarized content can be penalized by Google.
The whole reputation of a brand may be at stake.
So, the consequences of using plagiarized content can be fatal for an organization’s brand identity. Hence, you should always prepare plagiarism free content for your site.
The Age of Digitalization
In this age of digitalization, plagiarism is such an offense that can reduce your rankings and take away all your hard work .
The competitiveness of your brand depends greatly upon the quality of the content.
Well-thought-out and plagiarism free content makes every SEO campaign doubly effective.
Regular adaptation to the changing market trends is the best strategy in a competitive marketplace.
Competitors are always in search of weaknesses, the SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threats) of competitors present a clear picture.
Don’t allow your competitors to defeat you. Always produce original content and educate the users.
