Unique SEO Content: Know the Types of SEO Plagiarism

Plagiarism is taking or using someone’s ideas, work, expression or thought as your own, without such person’s knowledge or permission. SEO, which is search engine optimization, has been there for over a decade to increase traffic for websites. It is an important component of revenue for most industrial sectors as SEO helps give greater visibility to a website. Unique content, which means original content, is related to SEO, for it plays a crucial role in search rankings. With unique SEO content, a website is rated high by search algorithms, and in turn it also penalizes a website for duplicate content.

Most writers know the legal consequences of stealing or using others’ work. Nevertheless, their content is caught for plagiarism, and this is especially found in the SEO content writing.

What is Unique Content?

People look for information on the Web, and search engines such as Google and Bing try to give the best possible match to the users for their search. For the purpose, they use complex algorithms to find websites with the unique content SEO. The term ‘unique content’ refers to information on the website that offers value and is not duplicated. When you give information that is of high quality, original, interesting and valuable to readers, you drive a lot of traffic to your website, which results in the increase in sales and profit.

Types of SEO Plagiarism

It is difficult to determine the volume of copied content taking up space on the Internet. In fact, it is not easy to check plagiarized content if you have not come across and read the original source, and made note of the information. Most writers think that they do good, not knowing the fact that they commit plagiarism unknowingly. Here are some types of SEO plagiarism that one comes across in writing.

• Patch-writing

Patch-writing is a form of plagiarism, for it involves rewriting the content of another website. The readers do not find any new or unique value in the information. This form of SEO plagiarism is common among writers, usually anonymous ones who write for a cheap price. When a writer is good in paraphrasing, the content will pass plagiarism checking. Nonetheless, it is still unethical or illegal. It is bad for the SEO as there is no good content added, and if Google finds your content not offering anything unique, it will rank it low, or even worse, it will omit it from ranking.

• Copy-and-Paste

This type of plagiarism is committed by cutting and pasting the whole content from a website or in small sections from different websites on another website. This practice of having a semi-cohesive idea still exists. Therefore, most marketing companies are careful about plagiarism and demands zero percent of duplicate content in blog posts. However, some duplication cannot be avoided when there are many blogs on the same subject.

Moreover, some words and phrases can be written only in a few ways like “a 15-year bond yield”. You will not be penalized by search engines for it.

• Mosaic Plagiarism

When you use a phrase or sentence from a source in your content without attributing it to the original source or using quotation marks, it results in mosaic plagiarism. It is considered to have been committed intentionally or unintentionally and calls for a serious action. When writing technical articles, if copying or borrowing from a source is essential, you can use the content within quotation marks to avoid plagiarism.

• Accidental Plagiarism

It is essential to provide appropriate quotation marks and citation to the content you borrow from an original source. When you do not know how to quote, as well as cite, the copied content, it causes accidental plagiarism Similarly, if you paraphrase a sentence taken from another source and fail to provide in-text citation, it shows that the ideas and words are yours. This is another example of accidental plagiarism.

When using information from other websites, you should document it properly to not misattribute somebody’s ideas or words as your own.

• Image Plagiarism

Blogs and articles written for web pages require images to help aid the reader. Most images on the Internet are protected. If you take an image and use it in your blog, you will be penalized for copyright infringement. This will lead to bringing your website down or removal of the webpage from the search rankings. 

How to Fix Plagiarism?

By having a clear understanding of different types of plagiarism will help you avoid plagiarism and save your SEO efforts.

• Before you start writing content for a website, follow the guidelines religiously.
• Avoid patch-writing and for it, you should have good knowledge of paraphrasing, as well as careful handling of sources. You can rewrite the text in your own words and give proper references.
• When you refer external sources, take proper notes with bibliographic information like the URLs and page numbers. Use quotation marks for the text you copy and cite the source appropriately.
• When writing content, always have fresh ideas of your own included in it.
• Use a reliable plagiarism checker to check for any duplicate content. There are some advanced plagiarism tools to help you run a deep search to detect paraphrased or similar text.  

How to Protect Your Unique SEO Content from Plagiarism?

Using 301 Redirects

Where your website has a duplicate content problem owing to various websites having the same blog posting, you can redirect the crawlers and visitors by using 301 redirects. This helps you reroute the traffic permanently to your new URL.

Using Canonical Link Tag

You can use a “rel=canonical” link tag to show that the page is the same of another page. This helps inform the search engine to choose one page over the other.