You must be thinking what does plagiarism mean? Here is a concept of intentional or unintentional plagiarism. It doesn’t matter that you have consciously copied something or it was just unthinkingly it will be called plagiarized content.
Plagiarized content will affect your SEO and Google ranking because Google can detect duplicate material.
What is Plagiarized content?
When you publish, upload or pass on someone else’s words, ideas, or thoughts as your own, it is what we call plagiarism. Getting the same data on different URLs. Not adding citations or sources or just copy/paste is all included in plagiarized content.
Stealing the work of others can cost much to your site and business. It is unethical and can ruin the trust of the audience in online sources, especially yours.
Why avoid plagiarism?
- Unethical:
Plagiarism is not a good practice at any cost, whether you are running out of time or whatsoever. It is dishonesty and immorality. You will lose your respect for copying material.
- Losing creativity:
When you do not brainstorm for different ideas and thoughts, it will affect your creativity. You will not learn anything new. Your mind will become narrow and out of new ideas which will also lead to a loss in business.
- A theft:
Not adding the reference of the work you are taking from another person’s site is intellectual theft. It will not only erode your repute but you can be penalized by that person.
- Loss of trust and confidence:
People are looking for new and unique material online. Trust plays a very crucial role in online matters. Plagiarized content can put an impression of dishonesty on the audience. This will lose their trust in you and your business. Ultimately, it will have adverse effects on the growth of your site and career.
- Harms Search engine ranking:
Google crawl or index your site whenever new content is added to it. It does this to make sure if your content is unique or not. Google prefers exclusive content over duplicated. To tank higher in SERPs you need to have new and unmatched data on your site. Google puts back the websites on result pages that have copied content.
What are the ways to prevent plagiarism?
There are many ways to avoid plagiarism, quoting, citation, paraphrasing, plagiarism checking, etc.
Let’s look at different steps that will lead you towards original content without being guilty of plagiarism.
- Don’t forget the source:
Whenever you are doing research or gathering knowledge from the internet remember to note the sources. The data you are taking from any site never shut out the source. Add the date when it was published, the full name of the source, or anything important that must be there to avoid plagiarism. Add citation to whatever you have taken from someone else’s platform.
- Add quotations:
When you are going to include word to word or line to line the best way is to add quotation marks around it. It will show the readers that you are aware and not pretending that text to be yours. You can also mention the source to help people know where you took it from. For example:
“Quote me as saying I was misquoted” (Groucho Marx)
- Paraphrasing:
Rewording and rephrasing are one of the best ways to ward off plagiarism. You can rehash an old content into a new and unique one by replacing words with synonyms and changing the sentence structure. Many online paraphrasing tools are available for free. Rewording that is being done with these tools doesn’t change the original meanings of the text. These paraphrasers also give you an option to change your content into any different language. Some of these tools are:
- Prepostseo paraphrasing tool
- Paraphraz.it
Enter your text and click the button of paraphrase. The tool will do its job and provide you with accurate results. The loading part shows the processing.
- Article-rewriter tool
- Use Plagiarism checkers:
You must have heard about plagiarism checkers. Sometimes without knowing some sentences are added to your content from another source. And you don’t even cite the source. This is when these tools allow you to check if there is any duplicated or copied material in your article. There are many effective, accurate, and free tools available online.
These tools also show you the original platform from where your text gets matched. And they even highlight the specific parts to let you know where you need to change them. Down below are some examples of plagiarism checkers:
Check-plagiarism
Here are some pictures showing you the process.
Just enter your text in the textbox either by copy/paste or you can upload a file too. Then click the button Check Plagiarism. After that, you will your result in percentage of plagiarized and unique content.
- Put your thoughts into words:
Research and study but don’t write the whole article on the same concept. Try to brainstorm and create your ideas on already existing material. Put in your notion to make it entirely different and exclusive.
Sometimes when you write on the same niche many times, there is the probability that you can copy your content. This is called “Self-plagiarism”. It happens because writing on one topic multiple times can lead to unconscious copying. To make sure this won’t happen using above mentioned steps.