Whether knowingly or by mistake, copying content is an issue that affects a large number of websites on the Web.
Search engine never allows the websites to rank when they having the content of others. Remember… unique content is what search engines love!
Many of website owners have special content production teams that can help them produce high-quality, engaging, and plagiarism-free content for better SEO.
Below is information about duplicate content and its harmful effects on your SEO efforts.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content or plagiarized writing is content that has been created by someone else. If you happen to take a bit of content from their publication through copy/paste and then distribute it on your site without proper attribution, you have plagiarized content.
Plagiarized content has many effects and can be caused in a variety of ways, both intentional or unintended.
Why is duplicate content harmful and illegal?
If you’re looking for something on Google, would you like to see the same results over and over? Google’s goal is to show its users the best content and most relevant results about their query. Google will declare the content plagiarized (duplicate content) when it is similar to some other writing – it does NOT need to be an exact match.
Because of this, you should always write content that is unique and different from the ideas of others.
Plagiarism is not only about the copying of the words – it also is the stealing of ideas. Simply re-writing someone’s content in your own words is also considered a bad practice.
Here are the effects of plagiarism on the SEO of your site:
Effects of plagiarism on your site’s SEO
To say there’s a lot of content out there on the Internet, with billions of indexed web pages, is an understatement of epic proportions. At the point at which you publish the content on your site, it takes time for Google to crawl and rank it.
If there is a low probability that your site is famous and you regularly upload the content, Google will let it rank even more often, meaning that it would show your website for the keyword above than other competitors.
Google will not just look at the domain address of your site instead it would read and analyze your content.
When Google detects a bit of copied content it checks their databases to see whether it is a copy or not. After that Google has two options for indexing the article including the following:
Index it: Yes, Google can choose to show duplicate content in the search result pages if it turns out that they are relevant to a user and search engine optimization.
Various news networks use similar headlines and some of them use similar content but Google usually shows it in their results.
Stop the indexing of the article: Google throws your content into what is often referred to as Google Omitted Results.
Since Google’s bots are intelligent enough to detect duplicate content, you as a marketer need to always strive to produce new, ORIGINAL content to avoid penalty.
You can check plagiarism online for free to validate your content before posting it.
Changing some of the sentences or words from someone else’s site is NOT enough to deem your content as unique.
Content must contain unique thoughts and observations to be free from the claims of plagiarism.
Google algorithms can absolutely detect duplicate content… regardless of whether it has been modified.
Conclusion
When you are putting a lot of effort and investment in the SEO of your site, you should always consider building your website with the rules of search engines in mind.
If you violate any of Google’s rules, you may miss our on the top-ranking position. Remember, the majority of organic traffic only comes on the first three results!