The Problem with Plagiarism- Why search results won’t rank you higher

Plagiarism in the web content writing and copywriting world is considered nothing less than a felony. It's highly frowned at and puts the writer's skills into question. Over time, plagiarism has started With the evolution of communication media and technology, every business nowadays is turning digital to keep up with technology advancements and engage with their audience. They do so by hiring writers to create friendly and compelling content for their social media channels and website. These platforms need to updated with original and relevant in the form of blogs, articles, social media post, the latest news pieces, podcasts, videos, questionnaire, surveys and what not.

Every business out there is adamant on standing out and appearing atop search results thus, staying on top of the consumer's mind.

The sphere of digital marketing is getting bigger and competitive by the day and this rise has led to an increase in demand for content writers.

Writers are people who are technically responsible for creating fresh and original written material for your website and social media channels that get your business to rank higher upon searching. The words need to be different every time they write, even if they have to write about a certain niche a thousand times over for different businesses. That's their job.

Instead, too many self-proclaimed writers deliver old content by committing plagiarism.

Simply put, Plagiarism is stealing another writer's work and claiming it to be your own. Even more simply put, copy-pasting from another website(s) and taking credit for that stolen work.

It's important to understand that any plagiarized content will NOT get you any improved search result ranking. Because Google Search ONLY recognizes new and fresh content as worthy of appearing atop the page.

Here is how it goes: Any copy-pasted aka plagiarized content that a certain person would post as their own, has in fact been on the clouds of the internet for quite a while now. So, Google has given the root website its fair share of credit and recognition by placing it above all others (How else would you find it, and find it good enough to be steal-worthy?).

Otherwise, just like a spam folder, Google either places your website way below other results or filters it out completely, because people are looking for new and useful information. As stated in one of the top ranking websites about how Google determines your website's placement, Build Fire, Number 10, says and we quote:

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines advice webmasters to create sites with original content that bring value for the users. That’s exactly why affiliate websites, which don’t provide additional value for the search engine users, have a hard time getting high ranking.
And again in another post,

"You Do Everything Right, But Google Ignores Your Site. Why?"
Duplicate content

If your website features the same content on several pages, the search engine won’t index it. Plagiarism is a serial rank killer, even if the duplicate content is solely found on your site.

All in all, it's demeaning and worthless to go through all that trouble and not even get the desired results.

But, even the best of writers find themselves facing a writer's block and then looking up other writers' work for some help and inspiration. it seldom ever happens that they create a cliche blog post from scratch.

There's a thin line between turning an active sentence into passive and paraphrasing. To paraphrase is to restate certain information or statement using your own words. Because as cliche as active to passive conversion is, it's archaic and doing just that does not make anyone a good content writer.

Being out of words or the inability of coming up with good enough words is a real thing. It can happen to anyone. In situations like such, it's fine if someone looks up other websites' content for some inspiration. In fact, the more research, the more creativity flows in. An even more effective way to do that is brainstorming alongside. There would be tons of new ideas on the table by the time the research is complete.

To brainstorm is to write words or phrases coming from the top of the mind and tip of the tongue. Writing random (but relevant to the topic) phrases or creating a word cloud could be very helpful while experiencing a writer's block. These little practices don't only act as a pathway for a supposed current post, but also for future content.

Writers don't only "look" at a website and its content, they scrutinize it to the bone. They see what headings are used and how they are organized. They look at the overall quality of the content; the relevance, the tone of voice, respective terminology, jargon, word count, keywords, reader-friendliness - EVERYTHING. All this gives them an idea about in what direction their own writing should go.

Not paraphrasing- REALLY writing in own words. The content doesn't always necessarily have to be academic or formal. If a writer as enough knowledge about a certain niche, they can always write in their own words. Using one's own words and knowledge makes the writing more authentic and relatable.

It's always safe to run the written content through a plagiarism checker before publishing it anywhere. For writers and employers alike, there are a ton of plagiarism checkers online, available for free or priced at a certain subscription amount per month.

The best ones being Grammarly and Plagiarisma.

Grammarly is an automated proofreader and plagiarism checker that detects text formats, reviews spelling and grammar, suggest synonyms and better sentence composition finds supposed errors and checks whether the text is plagiarized.

Plagiarisma is another plagiarism checking dynamite that scrutinizes the internet to the bone. It supports 190+ languages and is supported by Android, IOS, Blackberry, Windows and Web. However, there are limits to plagiarism checks per 24 hours.

Dupli Checker, Copy Leaks, SmallSEOTools and some others that work online.

Aside from using plagiarism software, manual scrutiny of a written piece by an editor is also a good practice.

Just because Wikipedia and WikiHow rank highest in search results, plagiarizing content from these sites won't rank your website either. Their written material is super lengthy and supposedly invalid. And since information about every possible niche is up to those sites, there's a high chance that that information is not concentrated enough for good use.

Instead, legitimate websites that focus on a certain niche is more likely to have the information you are looking for.

Also known as verbatim. The act of mentioning the writer's name and using quotation marks in order to credit the information source is called a quotation. Quoting another writer's work with due honesty is the right thing to do in the writing ethic. Not only it gives the original writer its deserving credits, but it also makes the aspiring writer look legitimate, just as well.

The act of content citing falls in a relatively similar category of quotations. In the citation, a clear and concise link to the original content (often scholarly work) is mentioned for reference. This was done in handwritten research papers and book in the earlier time. Digitally, website referencing and citation has become a common practice.

Citations/ in-text citations appear in the body of text, whether the text is directly quoted or paraphrased; a text is cited to identify a particular author or publication for the user content.

Referencing is another stem of quotations and citations. Reference generally appears at the end of a text in the form of a list that is alphabetically arranged, showing the array of resources used in the completion of a certain writing piece. References may contain a list of book/e-books or journals, websites, blog posts, forums, speech, thesis reports, research reports, an interview, a documentary etc.

If the content idea is unique and new, there isn't much content on the internet to copy or plagiarize from. The puts the initially publishing website of that content in a higher place.