Budding Bloggers- Plagiarism Can Ruin your Reputation

Plagiarism is a serious dampener of creativity. Presenting someone else’s work as your own can decrease your motivation to produce original content. If people come to know their work is being copied, they will also be less likely to produce further work and post it online. There are often times that one can get inspired by other’s written words and try to express it in their own language.  But, failing to cite sources decreases accountability, and allows false information to be circulated unchecked.

Above all, plagiarism is a fraudulent activity. For bloggers and writers, plagiarism can not only harm reputation but also harm your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. This is because search engines like Google have ways to identify duplicate content. Copyright issues are treated very seriously by the world’s largest search engine, which can then proceed to penalize blogs. This means extreme low rankings and loss of organic traffic for your site.

Before understanding on how to check plagiarism, let’s see the different ways in which bloggers can unknowingly cause harm to their websites.

What Constitutes as Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is a serious offense, and there are various copyright infringement laws that can take your career away in a jiffy. But, it’s difficult to understand them. Moreover, there are always instances of taking some phrases from here and there and including it in your article. Does that qualify as plagiarism? It can be if you are:

• Stealing content from someone else’s blog and passing it off as your own
• Taking content from other sources, but not citing them or giving credit
• Completely presenting someone’s work as your own.

Apart from these, bloggers can unknowingly create plagiarized content through these methods:

1. Cutting and Pasting

Too lazy to write new content, writers often just cut and paste various sentences from multiple sources to form an article. While some duplication is expected when writers create articles on same topics, search engines will penalize when multiple paragraphs and sentences are just cut-pasted.

2. Patch-writing

Common practise among ghost writers is to rephrase content from other websites. But know that semantic search aims to go beyond just ‘keywords’ to provide users with content that can give some value. Such articles do not provide any value to readers.

3. Your Blog Being Copied

This goes both ways. Someone else can steal your content too and you can be penalized as a result. Search engines can think of your website as the problem, and lower your rankings.

Writers develop a style after years of being in the trade, and often accidently repeat themselves, if they belong in a niche category. This is why; it is advisable to keep content updated with current figures and syndicated industry news. Plagiarism checkers can also help in this task to ascertain that you don’t end up repeating an article written 10 years ago.

How to Check Plagiarism?

Whether you want to check for accidental duplicate content, repurpose your content or check for stolen content from your site, a plagiarism checker tool can be useful.

Having a content checker API in place can help track your content distribution online to see who else is sharing your blogs. Bloggers loaded with deadlines can find similar words, percentage results and highlighted passages and direct links to similar content in question; all within matter of minutes.

Moreover, modern plagiarism checkers can search extensive online database in all languages, and locate exact sentences and paraphrasing.

It’s important for bloggers to deploy such tools to maintain their credibility and list of readers growing. After all good blogs are the essence of all content strategies.