This article will explain in detail the best and easiest way to avoid plagiarism, this will help your website to rank very high on the search engine.
When they say “content is king”, you should be wary of the kind of content you publish on your website.
Is it copying or scraping content from another website that makes your own content king?
While you’re creating content for your website, you must know how to avoid plagiarism.
Google bots, for example, need to feed on fresh content on your site to boost your rankings and maintain a good position on the SERPs.
But with plagiarised content, that isn’t going to happen.
Plagiarism is a serious issue usually because it gives a bad image to the search engine.
It affects the user experience of your site.
In fact, the hosting company responsible for your website won’t hesitate to terminate your website if you’re culpable.
That makes it very important to optimize your content for humans and search bots before publishing it.
Content plays a significant role in search engine optimization.
And from all indications, SEO plagiarism is one of the reasons why most bloggers fail.
Intellectual property theft isn’t peculiar to digital marketing.
The menace happens in almost every industry – from academics down to the entertainment industry.
Having something on your site for your audiences to read doesn’t mean any content will entice them.
You need to avoid SEO plagiarism at all costs to create good-quality content.
This guide will provide you with the 5 best ways to avoid SEO plagiarism while creating content for your website or clients.
Table of Contents
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism refers to taking the vocabulary or thoughts of someone else and presenting them as yours without properly acknowledging the original author.
Plagiarism often means purposely copying the work of others through whatever medium – website or print media, most especially while gathering resources for your project.
Sometimes plagiarism occurs unintentionally, by being careless or forgetful.
Either way, plagiarism is considered a serious offence under copyright law.
Over the last few years, content has so digitally grown on the internet. But unfortunately, many writers who are in this race never deem it fit to create original content.
Avoiding plagiarism is so simple when you write the content with better research, original thoughts, and proper citations.
How Plagiarism Affects SEO
The ever-growing need for more and more content daily doesn’t always result in the original standard that the search engines and users are looking for.
If you are a beginner in the SEO field, you must have an idea about the content competition that is far stronger than ever before.
Every content developer wants his website on the first page of search engine result pages.
That is the work of SEO.
Moreover, if you’re copying and pasting or representing someone else’s text as yours, you’ll sink your SEO.
And for this purpose, there are many aspects of SEO to follow to make your content original and authentic.
Because duplicated or copied content can hurt the SEO rankings of a newly developed website, the practice is absolutely unsavory.
Aside from plagiarism, there are other factors of SEO you must consider as a content creator to rank your content on search engines.
These SEO factors include content optimization, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.
Altogether, there are over 200 SEO ranking factors. Watching out for them one by one can be overwhelming.
Instead, you can apply this SEO checklist each time you’re developing content to make sure you don’t violate any important SEO ranking factor.
An SEO checklist includes basic steps you need to take while trying to get more clicks on your website.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a newbie or an established business owner, an SEO checklist will help you in writing incredible content.
SEO plagiarism goes on both sides
From an SEO point of view, if plagiarism doesn’t affect you, it will definitely affect the person you’re copying his work.
That can explain the theory of duplicate content in Google SEO.
Meanwhile, the central argument of this discussion is to know why you need and how to avoid plagiarism.
Otherwise, it will be difficult for you to see how plagiarism affects your SEO efforts.
Plagiarism is something you have to watch out for in every bit of your copy to avoid being adversely punished for it.
One funny thing about plagiarism and SEO is that the owner of the content you’re copying can be penalized by Google.
If this happens to another author, someone else might plagiarize your own work too and you’ll be the one to suffer for it.
And in the worst-case situation, it’s possible that Google would penalize your whole website.
When that happens, you’ll be ripped off by your plagiarized content and then be outranked for it.
If Google is able to determine that you’re responsible for this issue, it won’t be difficult for the search engine giant to delete your content from its search result pages.
How to avoid plagiarism and its effects on your SEO
If you’re struggling with creating original content or don’t know how to avoid plagiarism and make your content clean and search engine-friendly, let us make this easy for you.
The following SEO plagiarism checklist should take your company to the next level.
1. Cite sources of your work
Be sure to put the citations when you are compiling your findings.
This will prevent you from forgetting to cite other authors that influenced your thoughts.
You may forget where you found a piece of information or a quote you intend to use in your work if you set your paper down for a couple of days.
Thus, it is important to mention the source of each bit of text when you’re doing analysis and writing content for your website.
One of the common ways for writers to commit plagiarism is to forget where an idea originated from and show it accidentally as their own.
By keeping your notes organized and compiling a list of citations as you go, you can effectively avoid this pitfall.
Keep track of the sources that you use for writing your project, including not just books and journal posts, but also blogs, articles in magazines, and photographs you get on the internet.
2. Write in your words
It’s good to explore other people’s old articles and create new and updated content every time rather than editing or rewriting the old ones.
For this reason, it’s worth pausing to review the content that you want to write and then try writing in your own words.
Here, you must conduct some strategic analysis before you do any more edits or revisions.
It’s best to look at the old materials more closely and consider the following:
- What was your initial purpose in writing the content?
- Where will it be successful?
- Where does it fall short?
The next step is identifying the most important goal keyword or search term for which you would like your posts to rank.
This practice will help you look for what ranks on the first list of search results for your target keywords and do some competitive analysis.
You can compare your own draft with other content that ranks on the front page of the search result and get a feel of the sort of content that Google views as the most important to a given search query.
It can also, though, help you with new ideas to update other people’s old content instead of repeating what they had said earlier.
To get even more from this move, try the SERP analysis tool like “SEO Buddy”.
3. Use a quoting technique
Quoting demonstrates interpreting every line of content word-to-word.
You should apply your terms to the copied terms, put them in inverted commas, and properly refer them to the original authors as their intellectual properties.
This would substantially allow you to prevent plagiarism in your content.
4. Use a paraphrasing technique
Paraphrasing tool, on the other hand, refers to describing something from a context and flipping it into your own words.
This allows you to only submit the most important information from a passage.
The main point of the author in the paraphrased texts has been reworded and condensed in the order of writing and the syntax of the content has been changed.
There are a bunch of paraphrasing tools out there that can help you flip the content fast.
But you need to choose a tool that uses AI algorithms to rephrase the content.
To discourage plagiarism while rephrasing, you need to make certain that your text is not too close to the original.
5. Check for plagiarism
Once you have finished writing on a subject, make it a habit to check for plagiarism in the content.
Who knows if you’ve added some findings or statistics to the article by accident and failed to quote the original author.
Checking for plagiarism in your content will help you discover several borrowed words or phrases that you need to change so your content can stay clean.
You can claim ownership of your content only when you know how to avoid plagiarism.
Conclusion
It’s significant to understand how to avoid plagiarism. Remove the idea of copying and pasting other people’s work as a content shortcut.
The practice can’t make you go far in blogging or creative writing as it’s a serious offense globally.
If you’re truly a good writer, you should be able to figure out what your responsibilities are and why you should avoid plagiarism.
Plagiarism is generally considered an unethical practice that represents a bad business model.
A simple form of stealing intellectual property can undermine your great work.
You must remember what it means to be at the top of the search list. Without quality and original content, you can’t get there.
Your SEO plagiarism will only push your website (or your client’s) to Google Hell.
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This is a great blog post about SEO plagiarism. I’m very impressed with how you covered the topic and how you were able to avoid it within 5 good steps. I found it very helpful and practical to know that I can avoid this problem in the future by knowing how to do it.