Importance of Check Plagiarism in Blog Posts for SEO?

Plagiarism! The bane of a writer’s existence. Duplicating content is not anything new, but unlike before it is easier to check plagiarism in work through the use of online tools.

What is plagiarism and why is it important to remove it? We shall take a look at these questions in detail.

What is Plagiarism?

According to the definition provided by Oxford languages, plagiarism is the act of “taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own“.

It is highly unethical and it goes against a writer’s integrity to be plagiarizing others’ work.

Plagiarism can occur in a few different ways; thus, it has some different types.

More details on some of the common types are discussed here.

Types of Plagiarism

●      Global plagiarism

The most common type of plagiarism is when a person copies the complete work of someone and presents it as their own. This is called “Global plagiarism”.

This type of plagiarism is now thankfully a bit difficult to get away with due to the ease with which people can check for plagiarism.

●      Mosaic plagiarism

When someone uses different bits of duplicated work from different sources and interlaces them with his own writing, then that is called “Mosaic plagiarism”. Compared to direct plagiarism, this is a little bit harder to detect.

●      Source-Based Plagiarism

This type of plagiarism occurs when someone either incorrectly cites a source, or they correctly cite the source but give an incorrect author’s name then this counts as “Source-Based plagiarism”.

●      Self-Plagiarism

Using your previous work in your new work without proper citation counts as self-plagiarism.

Another variant of self-plagiarism is when a student turns in the same assignment for 2 different subjects. This particular case can be excused if permission was given beforehand.

Why is it Important to Check for Plagiarism in Blog Posts?

Plagiarism has serious consequences when it comes to blog posting. Search engines use automated software called “crawlers” otherwise known as “spiders” or “bots” to go through a website and evaluate it.

This means that they collect data on your website and then based on some factors your website is assigned a rank in their engine.

This rank decides how high your website shows in the SERPs (search engine results pages). This rank is very important to bloggers and webmasters since it affects how much traffic their website will get.

Search Engine Penalizes Plagiarizing Websites:

What if I told you that plagiarized content on a blog can be detected by search engines and they can impose some severe penalties on the website that plagiarized content?

Hence it is important to check plagiarism in your content and remove it. Here are some ways you can get penalized by search engines for publishing plagiarized content.

1.    Rank:

It has already been explained what rank is, but it has not been explained how plagiarism affects it.

Search engines can detect if a website has duplicate content. This does not sit well with them and they will decrease the rank of the website that is plagiarizing.

A lower rank means they will show up very low on the SERPs.

That is terrible for a website, in fact for some, it is a death sentence.

2.    Delisting:

If a website is a repeat offender of plagiarism, then search engines such as Google will not only reduce its rank, but ultimately, they will remove the website from their index entirely.

This is known as de-listing. A delisted website will not even show up in the SERPs. That means that the only way to reach it would be to have its URL memorized and enter that into the address bar.

I am sure you can imagine how hard it will be to generate traffic on a website that doesn’t even show up in the search results.

Writer Reputation:

Blog posts are written by influential authors who are well known in their circles. If word gets out (as it eventually does) that such an author was plagiarizing work from others. That author will lose all their credibility.

People will start ignoring their posts and ignoring those websites that have their posts.

This is a terrible outcome for a writer as it is quite difficult to create, maintain and grow a reputation. It can take months if not years to make a name for yourself in this industry, and to lose it all due to plagiarism is something no one wants.

These are the consequences of hosting plagiarized content on your website that is why it is imperative that any duplicate content on your website is promptly removed or edited.

How to Check for Plagiarism?

It can be incredibly unfortunate for plagiarism to sneak into your work accidentally, but luckily there are many good online tools that can help you remove any plagiarism that you might have done.

These tools check plagiarism in the given file or text and highlight the plagiarized text. A lot of these tools give URLs that identify the source from which the text has been plagiarized.

You can find free tools that offer these services without requiring any registration. You might have to deal with some ads but that is a given.

Once you have found out how much plagiarism is present in your work, then you can start working on editing it. Acceptable plagiarism levels are 5%.

If your content has less than 5% plagiarism then you do not need to edit it, however, any more than that is not allowed. It can harmful for your SEO.

Removing plagiarism, unlike detecting it, is a manual job. You will have to go through each line that has been duplicated. And rewrite it so that it is not considered copied anymore.

Conclusion:

Plagiarism is a menace that is widespread in the world of content writing.  Plagiarizing content and then hosting it on your own website can have serious repercussions.

Search engines penalize websites that have plagiarized content and make their ranking lower or they completely delist them if the offence is large enough.

That’s why it is important to check your content for any accidental plagiarism that might have sneaked in.

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