Brand owners and professional writers should know that creating authoritative and high-quality content requires time, expertise, and professionalism. Plagiarism involves copying or taking credit for information that someone else has published on their website, book, or blogging post. You will face severe consequences when Google’s algorithms detect this issue. Read on to learn five ways content plagiarism affects your website’s SEO performance.
- Affects Your Content’s Quality
In most cases, search engines have already ranked the content you are trying to paraphrase or copy. By paraphrasing the same articles, you will be changing their meaning. For example, using a synonym of a word may provide a different sense in the statement since some synonyms may not apply in the same context. Additionally, the copied content may not harmonize with some parts of your articles.
Search engines seek to provide value. This means that poor-quality content will significantly affect your website’s ranking. To avoid this issue, ensure that you research your content extensively.
- Damages Your Brand’s Reputation
If a reader is researching the definition of terminology, they will look at other websites with a higher ranking than yours. This way, they will know if you copied your content from any of these pages. Publishing plagiarized content will make your target audience lose trust in you and your brand. They will always doubt the quality and originality of your material.
This issue will also affect your ability to make your brand more recognizable to your clients. It takes away your unique voice. To build a good image and establish yourself as a trustable source of data and information, ensure that you invest in creating original content.
- Attracts Search Engine Penalties
Google penalizes any website whose content is over-plagiarized. These penalties damage your SERP ranking. There are four primary degrees of penalties.
Firstly, keyword-level penalties harm a targeted keyword’s ranking. Secondly, URL-level penalties are more severe than keyword penalties because they affect the position of your URL on search engines. On the other hand, domain-level penalties affect your domain. In extreme cases, you may experience site removal, meaning that your target audience will not find you on Google.
- Causes Your Content To Get Fewer Backlinks
The role of backlinks is to direct readers and visitors from other websites to your website. They contribute significantly to SEO. For instance, the website with the highest ranking on Google has more backlinks than others in lower positions.
When you publish plagiarized content, you get fewer backlinks because other websites will not publish the information. As a result, your website’s SERP position will lower drastically. However, it is essential to know that the quality of the backlinks also matters. For this reason, ensure that more trusted websites link to your page.
- Prevents You From Getting Organic Traffic
Fresh and high-quality content attracts and engages more organic users on your website. This is because more people will love interacting with the text, videos, or images on your website. The excellent experience will also motivate the readers to return to your platform. This traffic increases consumer trust and your conversion rate.
On the contrary, plagiarized content creates a higher bounce rate because it lacks coherence, readability, and relevance. Visitors will click on your website and leave immediately if it does not offer the type of high-quality content they are searching for. This further interferes with your SEO efforts and attracts a lower SEO ranking.
To enable your website to attract more organic traffic, consider creating and publishing unique information. Use your creativity in this process. Remember that Google also considers the readability factor when analyzing a website’s text content. For this reason, ensure that the keywords match the metadata.
Additionally, use a plagiarism detector to check for duplicates before publishing any content on your website. This platform will highlight similarities and allow you to edit them out. It is also essential to proofread your content before you post or publish it. It is a great way to correct issues like unintentional copying, self-plagiarism, ungrammatical keywords, and poor word structures.
In summary, original writing will reward you through better ranking on search engines. With a lot of information on the internet today, it is easy to plagiarize your work accidentally. To avoid the above consequences, paraphrase, reference, proofread and use a plagiarism checker to ensure that your work is unique.
