Web Content Category at The Content Authority

Be it an e-commerce website, a site offering professional services, or even landing pages, good content is essential to bring in traffic. And for blogs, original content is bread and butter or something its core business revolves around. When talking about website content, “plagiarism” is an issue that often gets or should be discussed in the same vein. “Plagiarism” is replicating another author’s work or adopting their style and language without their knowledge or authorization and passing that work as your own. Copy-pasting other people’s content into your site is plain dishonesty or ethically wrong. Besides, it leads to several other issues. “Plagiarism” is something you could commit (knowingly or without intention) or fall prey to yourself. To not be affected and/or not inadvertently scrape other people’s work, it’s imperative to learn more about plagiarism, its kinds, ways to mitigate it, etc. Read on for all of that and more. What is Plagiarism? “Plagiarism” is the act of stealing another individual or entity’s intellectual property without the creator or rightful owner’s permission and passing it around as your own. Plagiarism happens in various industries, such as music, gaming, writing, academics, software (IT), etc. In the context of the written word, plagiarism is a website replicating verbatim another site’s content. Plagiarism is also paraphrasing another writer’s unique ideas without giving the original author due credit. The “Web” of Plagiarism When writing content for blogs or websites or even materials not meant for Internet dispensation, it’s standard practice to research the topic online. Expert writers may also not know it all and need secondary research to help their knowledge boats sail across. In today’s day and age, it’s virtually impossible to come up with content that’s entirely unique or has not been discussed before. Pretty much every topic under the sun has been covered to the hilt. Therefore, the goal when writing content should be to give a unique twist to what’s already said or say it in a better, more intuitive way. Most credible writers set out to do just that. But in the process, they might get heavily inspired or inadvertently replicate phrases or small chunks of texts from other people’s works. Not to mention, the deadlines or the constant pressure to churn out content can push writers further against the wall. Content Plagiarism is Not New-Found Plagiarized content is not a recent phenomenon. It has been around since the concept of sharing information online through websites was conceived and realized. In the past, multiple content-rich websites or “content farms” made a killing by scraping written information and reproducing them with minor changes. Those write-ups were expectedly unoriginal, low-quality, and also replete with grammar errors. However, online search engines soon took cognizance of the matter and tweaked their algorithms to penalize those websites and got rid of them for good. Writers for the web after that started to focus more on quality and less on quantity. Articles or blog posts that now feature on the first two pages of a search engine are invariably high-quality, in-depth, and well put together. Plagiarism, as a result, is not as blatant or menacing an issue as it was just a few years ago. But because content duplication is not always intentional and some writers still choose to rob other people’s intellectual property, plagiarism is not gone for good yet and will most likely never become non-existent. And that’s precisely why it’s critical to talk about the topic at length. Types of Online Content Plagiarism Plagiarism can be classified based on the level of duplication, the approach adopted by the writer, and a host of other things. Here are some of its most common types: Complete Plagiarism Complete plagiarism is what one would term copying a piece of text, such as an article, in its entirety. The website that reproduces the material completely does so without getting due permission or providing attribution – not that seeking approval would make any difference anyway. Such plagiarism is too obvious a case of “copyright infringement”. Established blogs or websites with a strong reputation or good monthly traffic are likely to be at the receiving end of such misacts. The sites that lift the content are invariably newly established sites with no real authors or just individuals masquerading as writers. Partial Plagiarism Partial plagiarism is also word-by-word copying, but the content is copied only in chunks or parts. The non-plagiarised portion of the text is blended with the plagiarized content to make the duplication aspect not very apparent or discernible at all. Unlike complete plagiarism, partial plagiarism hints at putting in the effort not to get caught for the replication. Regardless, it’s still not original work – not even partially. Lazy Plagiarism Lazy plagiarism happens when core ideas and important phrases from a third-party source or used by another author enter your prose. The intention may or may not be to plagiarize. The rephrasing work done is so shoddy, the finished text won’t clear any standard plagiarism checker tool online. Why is Plagiarism Bad If you’re looking to build a brand and a following for yourself online as a content creator, plagiarizing another writer’s work should not even be the last thing on your mind. It’s unprofessional and reflective of your writing skills or the lack of it. Search Engines Don’t Like It Another reason why online content plagiarism is a big no is search engines, such as Google, despise plagiarism. They avoid it like the plague or at least try to, as much as possible. If they find duplicate content on a site, they penalize the website by pushing it down its search results. And if the site is a regular offender, it could even get blacklisted or delisted from the search engine. If your website relies heavily on organic traffic or traffic not bought through ads, such punishments can majorly impact your pageviews and subsequent revenue. Possible Copyright Issues Plagiarised work could result in copyright infringement, which may cause myriad legal issues. In the realm of web content, such legal headaches are not most likely, but they cannot be completely ruled out either. It’s Immoral Plagiarizing another author’s work discredits all the effort and time the writer invested in creating that content. If your moral and ethical values are high, you will find this aspect of plagiarism having the worst impact on you. Even if you are not the empathetic kind, imagining your article being uploaded to another site with another person’s byline or name will prevent you from doing the same to another writer. Things You Could Do to Prevent Plagiarism as a Writer If you simply copy articles and paste them into your text editor and upload them to your site, you don’t need much assistance with mitigating plagiarism. Not indulging in copy-pasting is all that you require to do. If you do not intend to use other people’s work as your own, but your articles somehow happen to be guilty of duplication, there’s fundamentally wrong in how you do your research for your prose. Here are a few tips/tricks to set things right. Spend More Time on Research Behind every well-written article is a solid amount of research. And the lengthier the article or its scope, the more time you must devote to reading about the topic. Online research is not reading a few articles and paraphrasing them as your text. It’s imperative to read extensively on the topic from multiple sources. Try to understand the subject. Attempt to write only if you think you know the material well enough to explain it to others. If things are going over your head, look for information on the subject on other sites. Proceeding to write on something without proper comprehension of the subject matter could lead to incoherent text or sentences that do not flow well. And the other thing that’ll likely happen is inadvertent duplication. When you do not truly understand a piece of text and try to reproduce your version of it, you’re likely to mirror the original text to a great extent. Give Proper Attribution If the information you gleaned is relatively unique and not common knowledge, do attribute the source. It doesn’t matter how good a job you did with rephrasing those thoughts or putting them in your own words; do let your readers know the origin of that perceived distinctiveness. To make sure you do not forget to give due credit, note down the site’s name and its URL to link it later - which is after you’re done with the final draft. You may even link to the website while writing if you don’t want to end up with a list of website names and their links. The link should direct people and search engine bots to the exact page where you sourced the information from. The other site’s owner will also appreciate such particularness. Not to mention, linking to other sites in your posts could give a slight boost to your SEO efforts as well. Use Quotes in Texts If you want to use another site’s words verbatim and not get penalized for the same, use quotes. Blockquote the text within your post to make it more prominent and communicate the message that you acknowledge the source. Place a link to the website or online resource right below. Put Online Plagiarism Checkers to Good Use Thankfully, there is no dearth of online tools to ascertain whether a piece of content is unique or borrows unabashedly from other content existing online already. The following are some of the most common tools used for the purpose: Copyscape Grammarly Small SEO Tools ProWritingAid Dupli Checker Writer Unicheck All of the ones mentioned above are premium or freemium tools. Though there are completely free tools, those are not the most accurate and reliable and therefore not worthy of mention. What If You’re at the Receiving End of Plagiarism? If you have tons of content on your site and the articles consistently rank higher in search engines, there’s more than a slight chance of some obscure site with low or no search engine love duplicating some or all of your texts. Luckily, there are ways to deal with such plagiarizers. Contact the Offender Without Pouncing on Them As mentioned earlier, not all acts of plagiarism online are intentional or carried out with ulterior motives. Therefore, when you confront any website or owner of a site that’s rubbed you the wrong way, do not speak with them harshly or threaten them with lawsuits right away or even later in the communication. The webmaster may have outsourced the writing work, and those writer(s) may have done a sub-par job. Or the site owner themselves could have thought it was okay to reproduce other people’s content in exactitude provided a link to the original site rests beneath the content. It’s crucial to perceive and address plagiarism as a real business problem and not some family dispute where emotions are riding high. Let Them Know Your Options When politely requesting the site owner to take down the copied content doesn’t work, you could inform them of the alternate resorts you have at your disposal. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) empowers affected site owners or writers to request search engines to deindex the site with duplicate content. Let the infringer know you have these legal recourses, which you would not like to take and want to resolve the situation amicably. Realizing the kind of trouble they are in, the website in the wrong is highly likely to reciprocate favorably. Conclusion Content plagiarism is something most established writers do not worry about. It’s the least of their concerns. They do not even bother checking their final piece for plagiarism because they steer clear of all things that could lead to plagiarism during the content creation phase. For newbie writers, however, plagiarism is a noose looming near them at all times. The fear of duplicating someone else’s work vanishes only after they finish writing their piece and check it for its originality. But suppose you’re relatively new to website writing or do not consider yourself an expert at putting words together to communicate ideas. In that case, the information above and the various tricks and tips shall undoubtedly give you a head-start. And with time and practice, you won’t feel the need to check your content for its uniqueness each time you’re done writing – just like those authors worth their salt.