Plagiarism is undesirable in any field of work or study. However, in the world of search site optimization and marketing, plagiarism is considered as a sin. Internet plagiarism is unethical, illegal and detrimental to your online marketing campaign. One rule of thumb to get the edge in search engine rank race is to produce unique text content. Once you fill your site with copied and pasted content published on other websites, the search engines get the wrong message and that may irretrievably affect your site’s SEO rank.
Plagiarism is a sin – thou shalt not copy and paste
It has been a favorite topic of debate among search marketing experts as to whether copying and pasting texts from other websites affects search site rank or not. However, with all the major search engine rolling out one after another search algorithms that are aimed at decontaminating the web from spam elements, practicing plagiarism has become equivalent to committing a sin.
The bottom line is that never ever copy and paste from other websites.
Many entrepreneurs hold an opinion that copying and pasting fragmented texts from other websites is quite harmless. There is another school of thought that believes copying texts from authoritative websites is acceptable. Do not get misled by these plagiarism preachers. Plagiarism, in any form, is illegal and the search engine optimization world does not write its rules differently.
What is plagiarism on the web?
Merriam Webster dictionary defines plagiarism both as transitive and intransitive verb. As an intransitive, plagiarism is defined as an act of literary theft, to steal intellectual properties. In the world of web, plagiarism simply means scrapping content from other websites. Note that content scrapping was a common practice until a few years ago. But now, plagiarism can affect your site’s popularity and visibility on the web to a great extent.
Understanding the legal consequences
You cannot escape the eyes of internet content originality watchdogs if you commit plagiarism. There are quite a few plagiarism-checking websites that can compare the text of your website with texts from around the world of web and identify the littlest traces of literary theft within microsecond. More importantly, if a commercial entity or any individual happens to discover that your website content is copied and pasted from their website, partly or fully, they can take appropriate legal steps against you and your organization using the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Copyright Infringement lawyers are there to assist them.
How your website’s SEO rank goes south when you practice plagiarism?
Search engines like Google frown on the use of duplicate content in websites. Scraped text is something that all search sites simply abhor. It may lead to permanent blacklisting of your site, temporary suspension of your account, and your websites search rank may go down to an unfathomable low. You may see steep drop in search rankings and you may also find your website nowhere among the search results, not even on the millionth page of search result. If you really require excerpting text from other websites, provide proper citations.
Why plagiarism is a strict no-no in the Hummingbird era?
Google Hummingbird is one of the major algorithmic updates of the search giant. It aims to value original, informative and quality content and to deal with sites with duplicate and low-quality content severely. Similarly, Bing and Yahoo also take stringent steps against sites with plagiarized content.
How to protect your site from plagiarism?
If you are not sure whether your site’s content is original and if you want to stay in the clear in the future, you may use the online content plagiarism checkers such as https://www.duplichecker.com/. These plagiarism text checkers are the most effective means to detect and eliminate plagiarism. Alternatively, if you have found a website that has copies and pasted text from your site, you can inform Google about the issue and also can appoint a copyright infringement lawyer to take proper legal steps against the owner/webmaster of that site.
