Plagiarism has really bad consequences for writers in general. But today we are going to check out what kind of bad effects it has on SEO.
As you may know, content writing plays a large part in SEO. Search engines like Google and Bing rank web pages based on things like usefulness, readability, uniqueness, and accessibility.
All of this is easy to provide by using textual content. That’s why, even in this era of audio-video-dominated marketing, blogging, and other types of textual content still survive.
But we digress, the topic at hand is the effects of plagiarism on SEO. In this article, we will teach you about those effects as well as how to detect and remove plagiarism from your SEO content.
What are the Consequences of Plagiarism in SEO
1. Rank Reduction
The first problem of plagiarized content is that it is easy to detect. Another problem with plagiarized content is that writers can unknowingly create it. Yes, accidental plagiarism is a real thing and it can hurt your SEO content.
Search engines have a vast database of content, they know the publishing dates of everything on their index.
So, if new content is published that is too similar to older content, search engines will check it for plagiarism.
If there is a significant amount of plagiarism, then the search engine will rank the web page very low on the SERPs. So, plagiarized content can single-handedly destroy all of your SEO efforts.
It won’t matter that you optimized keywords and added external and internal links and kept the readability high. Simply because there is plagiarism in your content, it will be banished to the dark recesses of the SERPs where no one will ever find it.
2. Delisting/De-indexing
The other big consequence of plagiarism is the complete delisting of the webpage. You know that all search engines have an index. This index is where they store webpages against the keywords they rank for.
But, if some content has too much plagiarism in it, search engines will refuse to index it at all. That means the web page for that content can’t be found on the search engines that did not index it.
So, forget about being low-ranked on the SERPs, this means that the content won’t be on the SERPs at all. And that is really bad for SEO. The entire purpose of SEO is to let people find your content naturally by seeing it on the SERPs.
So far, we looked at the scenario where the content was not indexed, to begin with. But if some previously published content is also found to have a significant amount of plagiarism in it, then search engines can remove it retroactively.
That means, all the page authority and valuable backlinks accumulated by that page are gone. This means that all your SEO efforts for that page are now moot.
How to Detect Plagiarism in Your SEO Content?
We mentioned that plagiarism can occur in anyone’s work by accident. But there is no need to be alarmed. There is a really easy way to detect plagiarism. And once you detect it, you can remove it. So, here are the steps to detecting plagiarism in your SEO content.
1. Find a Tool
There may be plenty of ways to detect plagiarism, but the most reliable one is to use a plagiarism checker/detector. You can find a free plagiarism detector online and nine out of ten times, it will be extremely accurate.
Online plagiarism detectors can scrape the web and compare your content to billions of online sources in the span of a few seconds. The results are accurate, and you can double-check them by using multiple tools.
So, find a plagiarism detector by searching for it online. You will see many results. Just open a few of them and choose the tool that you like.
2. Input Content
Once you have selected a tool to your liking, you have to input your SEO content into it. Now most tools have the option to copy and paste your text into the tool. But plenty of them also have alternate input options. Some of them include:
- Uploading files
- Using a URL of an online file
- Importing a file from cloud storage
This kind of thing is important because it provides more flexibility when checking for plagiarism. Anyhow, select the method of input you want and input your content. Then you will need to press/click a button to start the checking process.
3. Read the Report
Once the tool is done working, it will produce a detailed plagiarism report. This report contains information such as:
- The exact amount of plagiarism in a work
- The exact areas of the text that are plagiarized.
- The links to the online sources that have matching content.
This information is critical for removing plagiarism. Most free plagiarism detectors let you download this report if you need to save it.
You can use the information from this report to either cite the sources, paraphrase the content, or simply delete it.
That way you will be able to remove plagiarism from your work and evade its negative effects on SEO.
Conclusion
In summary, plagiarism is an unethical act that has negative consequences for writers. In this article, we saw that if the content is plagiarized, then it destroys all SEO efforts because they bear no fruit.
Search engines either reduce titans of webpages with plagiarized content or remove them from their index, this means that fewer (or none) people will find it.
The method to detect plagiarism is to use a free plagiarism detector and consult its report. This report provides all the information necessary to remove plagiarism.
