In simple terms, plagiarism is plain stealing. It is illegal to violate copyright and could lead to various adverse consequences, not the least of which is a lawsuit.Along with destroying professional and academic reputation, it can sink your website down the search engine rankings, if Google doesn’t blacklist your site altogether. That would certainly defeat the entire purpose of having a website at all.
In case if you have accidentally plagiarized content, here’s how it can prove risky for your website.
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Destroys Your SEO Game
If you have picked up information from another source and simply copied it on to your website, search engine algorithms can detect the identical text. This means that your website will be less likely to appear in the SERPs at all, leave alone in the top ranks. To stay on top of the first results page, you need to produce fresh ideas and original content. If you are stealing content and using it without credit to the source, the website will definitely lose popularity real quick.
Search engines today are smart and can detect where the content was originally published. Therefore, you cannot stuff keywords to dupe the search bots. In fact, you can also be penalized, which would be quite difficult to overcome.
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Legal Consequences of Plagiarized Content
There are several types of plagiarism, such as patch working, cut-paste or unintentional plagiarism, which can all be detected with a good website plagiarism checker. No matter what the type of plagiarism, it is unacceptable in all forms. You could be sued this act too. Many websites come with copyright laws and DMCA protection. Therefore, the original author has the right to take legal action against anyone who duplicates their content.
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The Site’s Reputation Will be Hurt
The most dangerous consequence of plagiarism is that your website loses its credibility. In case you copy content that has already been paraphrased, the meaning could change altogether. This could result in inaccurate information being displayed on the website. It will lack quality and definitely be pulled down in the search pages. As the owner, you will always be viewed with suspicion. If you get involved in legal matters, it could even mean an end to your career. By no means can you manipulate search engines, since they update their algorithms regularly.
How to Avoid Plagiarism on Your Website
There are several ways to avoid plagiarism, even accidental. Take a look.
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Checker Tools
Check out the best website plagiarism checker online. It will allow you to scan up to 100 documents at once. These tools are equipped with advanced technologies that can perform extensive search through million of journals and archives and detect plagiarized content. Monitor each and every line of the content well before uploading it on your website.
Some tools come with multi-language facility and deliver customized and comprehensive solutions. All you have to do is integrate your system with the Open Source API to work with the ready to use code.
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Other Measures
Check whether the content has accurate references and citations. They should be in the right format to escape the tag of plagiarism. Apart from that, buy content from a reputed content marketing company. There would be zero chances of plagiarized text in this case.
Use scanner tools available online to detect plagiarism within seconds. You will know from where the paragraphs have been copied too. Making quick amendments will not be difficult.
