How to Avoid Web Content Plagiarism on Your Website

Web content plagiarism is the worst thing that can happen to your website since it is pretty high to deal with it. Google and other engines strive to reflect the most recent and new information on the top, sending plagiarized articles to the bottom. If you do not check your content for plagiarism before publishing it, you can be wasting your money on SEO without even noticing it.

With lots of new blog posts and other written content being created every day, it is hard to keep your website original and unique. However, these two characteristics play an important role in making your website rank top in search engines and become visible to a larger number of people.

Thus, you must detect any form of plagiarism and adjust your content accordingly before it gets published. Also, it is necessary to make your writers dedicated to providing 90–100% original content, acknowledging the importance of copyright.

Let us go ahead and find out more about plagiarism and the ways to deal with it.

What Is Plagiarism?

Many of us think that plagiarism is borrowing one’s ideas or copying one’s work. It should take at least 5-10 words or even a whole sentence to be detected. However, this is far from being true. The words “copy” or “borrow” serve as euphemisms to cover the ugly truth of stealing one’s intellectual property. They mask the real nature of such a phenomenon as plagiarism.

Even such thing as paraphrasing can qualify for plagiarism unless it is properly referenced. as long as a person saying something has it on record or in writing, it constitutes their intellectual property. Failure to refer to the authors when mentioning their ideas automatically makes your article plagiarized.

That is why educators pay so much attention to identifying plagiarism in school essays. They strive to learn students to use a plagiarism percentage checker to check their writing before submission.

When it comes to web content, the rules are pretty similar. You should not copy one’s information because you harm your ratings. However, you may need to refer to certain popular ideas in your writing. For these situations, there are several ways to avoid web plagiarism.

How to Avoid Web Plagiarism?

When it comes to web content, we should care about uniqueness and originality as well. It is even harder to meet these requirements. If certain words and collocations appear in one text in the net, they can be highlighted in your plagiarism report.

Wonder how you can avoid it? Let’s find out.

Do not Hurry

Do not hurry up when you write. Seriously, even if the deadline is close, it is better to be late than submit plagiarized work. It is better to take as much time you need to work extra and make your work new and fresh.

Limited time is the most common factor that pushes writers to commit a crime. However, the majority of situations allow taking extra time to submit a better paper. Thus, if you are a writer, try asking for more time. If you are an employer and want to receive good work, postpone the deadline.

Read More

To know what to write about, we tend to search for the information. If your knowledge comes from only one source, the chances that the work will contain plagiarism are higher.

Try to diversify your sources of information. Read several articles or in different languages (if you can) to minimize the chance of copying one’s ideas. If you do, reference your direct or indirect quotations so that the source would be easy to find.

Link Wisely

Also, it is always a good idea to find the original source. Many blog writers refer to other blog articles, that is not correct in terms of referencing. If you acknowledge that the information is borrowed, it is better to dig deeper and find the original work.

Such link building helps you increase the originality of your work. Also, multiple links to original resources increase your chances of getting connected with the original authors. It is always good to build a relationship like this.

Learn to Paraphrase

Paraphrasing is not a panacea for plagiarism. Borrowed ideas, even paraphrased, can still be counted as partial plagiarism. However, you can try putting the idea you’ve gotten from somewhere into your words and add your evidence.

Web content plagiarism is something that can be tracked because it still uses the same words, examples, etc. Thus, if you write an article about the automobile market and see that the author X has already used Porsche as an example, you should write about Mercedes or another brand. Avoiding plagiarism is a lot easier than we think.

Create Multiple Drafts

Even if you think that you did not plagiarize, there might be some issues with originality and uniqueness. You anyway use the language common for a certain industry that you research. Thus, there may be cases of unintentional plagiarism.

To correct that, you should create multiple drafts and adjust, paraphrase, and check each of them over and over to reach near-100% originality. These drafts are needed to trach how changes help you in improving the uniqueness percentage.

Is Plagiarism a Crime?

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Why is it so important to get rid of plagiarism?

It is not only bad for your SEO ranking, but also illegal. In fact, plagiarism is indeed recognized as a crime equal to stealing. You should be willing to provide high-quality information to your audience but not at the expense of losing the trust of your audience.

At the same time, it is not true that you cannot rely on facts discovered by others. If you can properly mention the source of the information, you are good to write about it and present it to your audience. You mustn’t elevate these ideas as if you are their author.

How to Check for Plagiarism?

To check whether your article contains web content plagiarism, you must use a plagiarism detector. There are lots of them available online. Some of them are more detailed while others do only surface searches. In any case, you will definitely find something that may need improvement.

Web content is fine if it contains less than 10% of plagiarized parts. They should mostly consist of keywords. These words are needed to make your content searchable. They are hard to change, so they stay as they are. You should strive to make keywords the only highlighted parts in your work. The rest of it should be unique and original.

Final Words

Web content plagiarism is a plague that negatively affects your SEO statistics. At the same time, it is easy to check your article for plagiarism to avoid publishing low-quality texts. There are lots of plagiarism detectors available that can highlight the repetitive parts for you.

Dedicated and reputable writers never borrow one’s ideas without mentioning the source. However, when it comes to web content plagiarism it is even wider than the academic one. You should care about uniqueness and originality, too.

BIO

Susan Wallace is a freelance writer who creates academic and marketing content. She is dedicated to protecting intellectual property and knows everything about copyright. In this article, Susan provides interesting facts about web plagiarism and recommends the best ways to avoid it.