We all know that plagiarism is ethically wrong but do you know it can badly affect your site’s SEO? If you keep on publishing plagiarized content, your site’s SEO will be at high risk.
SEO has become an integral part of every online business whether you are running a skincare brand or your blogging site, search engine optimization is a staple to success.
Search engine optimization offers many benefits to businesses therefore, your marketing strategy must work to avoid plagiarism in any form it can negate those benefits.
But the question here is, how plagiarism affects your site’s SEO, and why avoiding plagiarism is necessary for SEO?
If you are thinking the same question then you are on the right guide. In this post, we will discuss 9 reasons that can help you understand why avoiding plagiarism is necessary for SEO so that you can enjoy the complete benefits of SEO.
So, let’s get started!
What Is Plagiarism & What Are Its Common Types?
In order to avoid plagiarism for SEO, you first need to have a complete understanding of plagiarism and all its common types so that you can plan effective strategies to avoid its occurrence.
Plagiarism is an act of stealing someone else’s work and presenting it with your name whether it’s an article, an idea, or a video if you use others’ work without their permission or without giving proper credit to them then you are committing plagiarism.
No matter what degree of plagiarism is there inside your website, search engine algorithms are very efficient and intelligent at detecting plagiarism.
You can easily detect plagiarism in your content by using online plagiarism detection tools. So, a plagiarism detector can help you, if your site is caught by Google for having plagiarized content it will be bad for your site’s SEO.
The benefit of employing a plagiarism detector is, you can highlight every type of plagiarism whether it is accidental or self-plagiarism.
Types of Plagiarism
There are many types of plagiarism but here we will discuss a few most common types of plagiarism that you might encounter on daily basis without knowing.
↳ Copy-paste plagiarism
Copy-paste or intentional plagiarism is what bloggers and marketers mostly commit in their work and this type of plagiarism is easily identified by a search engine like Google.
Because intentional plagiarism is easy to detect by a search engine, therefore, it has more chances of jeopardizing your site’s SEO and it is crucial to avoid it for SEO.
Copy-paste plagiarism is obvious from the name when we copy a piece of text or entire text directly from the internet and use it inside our content without paraphrasing or giving credit.
Intentional plagiarism is also called mosaic plagiarism where we steal chunks of text from the internet and use them with the same structure and original meaning such plagiarism can be devastating for your SEO.
↳ Accidental plagiarism
Unintentional plagiarism is also known as accidental plagiarism and it occurs mostly when we read some sentences or phrases online and later use them in our work without remembering where we read them.
In this case, we usually end up writing those sentences and phrases by using the same original words and general structure and accidentally commit plagiarism.
Another reason why accidental plagiarism is common in our content writing is that writing common phrases and keywords is a good practice to enhance SEO therefore, you should always remember the original ere you find those phrases and keywords.
↳ Self-plagiarism
Self-plagiarism is another common type of plagiarism among bloggers and marketers, it occurs when bloggers and marketers use some section of their old content to create new content.
Suppose, you wrote content about a laptop 2 years ago and now you copy some sections of that old content to create new content about the same laptop company but for the latest model, this is self-plagiarism.
Though self-plagiarism might not be a copy-right issue as far as a search engine is concerned it is not good for SEO.
9 Reasons Why Avoiding Plagiarism is Important for SEO
So far, we have discussed plagiarism and some of its common types, it might help you know which type of plagiarism you mostly commit in content marketing.
Now we discuss the reasons to know why avoiding plagiarism is important for SEO.
So, keep on reading!
⇒ To Avoid Search Engine Penalty
The first reason why you should avoid plagiarism is to avoid getting a search engine penalty for your website.
A search engine like Google has become exceptionally intelligent at detecting plagiarized content and if it finds content on your website that is more than 10% plagiarized, the chances are Google will penalize your site.
The penalties that you will get because of plagiarism are in four forms:
↳ Keyword level penalties
If you get a keyword penalty from Google, it will diversely impact the ranking of your site for a certain keyword or for quiet keywords however, other keywords will be left unaffected.
↳ Domain-level penalties
Domain-level penalties are really the worst, if you get a domain-level penalty, it will have a diverse impact on your whole site, and your site will drastically lose its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
↳ Directory-level penalties
Directory-level or URL-level penalties are not as bad as domain-level penalties are, if you get a URL-level penalty, it will diversely impact the ranking of a particular URL.
↳ Site removal penalties
The most dreadful level of penalty among the others is site removal, if you get this penalty your site will completely vanish from search engine results pages.
You can get any of these penalties if you publish plagiarized content on your site and remember if you get a penalty from Google your site’s SEO will badly suffer.
⇒ To Avoid Copyright Infringements
As we discussed previously, plagiarism is ethically bad and if you commit plagiarism, you will likely face copyright infringement issues.
When you copy someone else’s words and use them in your work with your name without the permission of a copyright holder you violate intellectual property rights laws and in return, you will get copyright infringements.
If the copyright of the content you copied from the internet is expired, there won’t be any violation of intellectual property rights laws.
But if the copyright is still active then the copyright holder might sue you for using his work without permission and you might face jail time.
Writers and marketers normally cite sources to avoid copyright infringement issues but if you are copying excess protected content then citing sources might not save you so be careful with what you are copying and how much you are copying.
⇒ To Gain Maximum Organic Traffic
Gaining organic traffic has already become a very challenging thing for website owners as organic searches count on the average scale of more than half of the whole website traffic.
And to gain maximum organic traffic you need to create fresh and unique content that is nowhere near plagiarism because plagiarized content will harm your Site’s SEO ranking and a lower ranking can never get your site any organic traffic.
No matter how great your content is if it is more than 15% plagiarized then the Google crawlers will take such content as a lack of originality and you will get one of the four penalties we discussed previously.
Eventually, your site’s SEO score will fall and you will fail to get organic traffic. If you follow a few simple practices, you might actually site’s SEO score to fall.
Make sure you always create and publish SEO-optimized content, add profitable keywords, create SEO-friendly tags and headings, regularly update your content, and always run your content through a plagiarism detector before you publish.
Moreover, checking your content through a plagiarism detector also helps you fix plagiarism in the content by listing all the matched sources so make it your practice to run the content through the tool before publishing.
⇒ To Get More Backlinks
It is not wrong to say that backlinks are the backbone of any rankable content as they are a primary search engine ranking factor.
And to get quality backlinks your site should be authorized and have a high DA score.
Plagiarism can affect the DA score of your site and if the DA score is low the chances are you will lose the vote of confidence for a high ranking on SERPs. You can measure your website Domain Authority from a DA PA checker.
A well-reputed DA PA checker mostly uses Moz metrics to calculate the domain authority as well as the page authority of a website. You just have to enter the website’s URL into it and it will show you the DA of your website between 1 to 100. Additionally, for some DA PA checkers, you can enter multiple sites in one go.
After all, guest posting is considered the most viable option to get high-quality backlinks but if your content is plagiarized the chances are other sites might not publish your content and as a result, you won’t get any backlinks to your site.
No backlinks mean almost zero chances of ranking on Google so, try your best to create only and only plagiarism-free content so that you can boost your SEO ranking.
⇒ To Create a Large Social Signal
Strong and plagiarism-free content is likely to be shared more on social media by readers and the more shares your content gets on social media, the more chances of high ranking on a search engine.
People love to read unique content that provides information and such content is appreciated by readers in the form of shares.
People share knowledgeable content and with every share, there is an increment in the social signal for your site and business.
And a search engine uses social signals to determine the credibility of the site which eventually gets you a high ranking of SERPs so, we can say that social media can help you boost your SEO ranking.
All you have to do is create unique content and let social media influence your SEO ranking.
⇒ To Build a Strong Brand Appearance
Another reason why avoiding plagiarism is important is to build a strong brand appearance and to make this possible you need to create and publish plagiarism-free content.
Unique content got a unique style and customers easily recognize your brand’s unique style which helps them remember your brand if you succeed in making people remember your brand you will achieve a strong brand appearance.
Content is all your customers got because you are not there to communicate with them physically but the content you publish on your site tells customers everything they are looking for and if it is not original you got no luck.
More time people spend on your site will give signals to the search engine about your site’s authenticity and your site will get ranked.
Once your site is ranked high on SERPS, the search engine will show your brand whenever a user type query or keyword that is relevant to your brand, and your sales will grow immensely.
⇒ To Drive More Visitors
Plagiarized content will never drive readers back to your site on the contrary it will make readers immediately leave your site.
Readers are always in a search of high-quality and informative content because such content engages them and boost their interest in your site.
Almost every content marketing strategy aim at creating high-quality and productive content because suck content got the power to drive readers back to your site and make them stay longer on your site which is good for your site’s SEO.
⇒ To Maintain Your Reputation
Building and maintaining your brand reputation are two different things, you might build your brand reputation by publishing unique content at first but if you stop publishing unique content you might fail to constantly maintain that reputation.
It will take very less time for Google to find duplicated content on your site and if there is any duplicated content exist on your site Google will drastically affect your site’s overall ranking and you will see how quickly you lose the reputation of your business.
So the key to maintaining a constant brand reputation is to constantly publish unique and high-quality content.
⇒ To Get Search Engine Crawlers Index Your Site
Last but not least, you should avoid plagiarism in the content for better SEO ranking if you want to get the eyes of Google crawlers, the crawlers are so intelligent at finding a website with plagiarized content.
If you want Google crawlers to index your site then you must avoid plagiarism because crawlers won’t index a site with plagiarized content no matter how you optimize the content by adding meta descriptions, optimizing titles, and adding visuals.
Conclusion
Plagiarism is dreadful for SEO and many people don’t even know how it can harm their site’s SEO performance.
In the above sections, we have discussed plagiarism in detail with its common types so that bloggers and marketers know which types of plagiarism they are committing and why they should avoid plagiarism.
To know why avoiding plagiarism is important for SEO, you can directly jump to the 9 tips we discussed above, and you will have a precise idea of why plagiarism is bad for SEO.
