From school papers to website articles, most of us understand that plagiarism is ethically forbidden. While most of us do not boldly cut and paste articles and pass them off as original work, some individuals do cross boundaries by copying ideas or text. However, it is crucial to know that swiped or duplicate online content will not benefit a website in the end, and plagiarism kills SEO efforts. Even if the material was originally your own work, regurgitating previously published content will carry negative consequences for your search engine rankings.
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is using someone else’s work or ideas without giving them credit. Plagiarism is considered to be a form of stealing, and whether at a university or on a law firm’s website, plagiarism is considered to be a dishonest practice. Avoiding plagiarism is crucial for several reasons, but sometimes copying someone else’s work is subtle, and you may not realize you are doing it. There are different ways plagiarism can occur.
Copy and Paste
Dragging the cursor over an article, then copying, pasting, and passing it off as your work is blatant plagiarism. It will not take the search engines very long to discover this type of plagiarism, and your website ranking will suffer for it.
Patchwriting
Patchwriting is the form of plagiarism that takes excerpts of content from another person’s work and adds it to their own. Patchwriting may include rewriting some of the words, paraphrasing a few sentences, or adding small changes but keeping the original structure and much of the text the same as the original. This is essentially reworking the same content without adding value.
Unintended Plagiarism
Unintended plagiarism is copying work from another person without direct intent to do so. If you have read various articles on a topic, certain keywords or phrases may stick in your head, and may come out in the text as you produce what you believe is an original work. In reality, you have added ideas and words borrowed from another source without citing the original author.
Plagiarism Kills SEO
Plagiarism kills SEO and works against your marketing efforts because search engines like Google highly value top-quality content that delivers value to consumers. If you are overusing, recycling, or republishing content verbatim, you are not giving readers valuable content — and the search engines recognize this. Algorithms such as Google Panda and RankBrain attempt to identify sites that publish repeat content and demote the site’s rankings because of it. If the search engine discovers two sites that carry identical content, they will only publish one of these, and if your content is deemed to be copied, your website may be penalized according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Copied Content Doesn’t Mesh With Your Brand
If you steal content from another website, chances are it will not harmonize with your brand as well as if you had originated the content yourself. Often, this ends up disappointing website visitors and giving them a poor user experience. If visitors quickly exit after finding minimal value, this affects your bounce rate and other ranking factors that are central to a solid marketing strategy.
Plagiarism Hurts Your Credibility
In the end, your audience will discover that your bland and boring content is simply regurgitated from another source, and your credibility will suffer. Although creating high-value content takes time and money, it is a worthy investment. Having this mindset will give you more than a clear conscience; avoiding plagiarism but will bring you more engaged website visitors, brand loyalty, and steady business growth.
Avoid Plagiarism
By following a few guidelines, you can avoid plagiarism and assure that your content is fresh, original, and perfectly suited to your unique brand and target audience.
Start with Your Own Ideas
When launching an article, start with your own ideas before you look at other resources. You can begin by communicating your unique perspective; one that fits perfectly with your own expertise, brand, and audience. If you use the words or ideas of another person, quote the source by using quotations marks or citings within your article.
Paraphrase Carefully
When you rewrite words from another piece of text, be cautious. It can become easy to copy words or an entire article format. It can be tricky to paraphrase information without changing the meaning, and if you borrow ideas from another writer, be sure to cite the source of the idea.
Check Often for Plagiarism
Even if you habitually avoid plagiarism, it is a wise idea to periodically check your website for it. There are excellent online tools that make this easy, and help you avoid the mistake of duplicate content, and some of the best sites are: Copyscape, Grammarly, Bibme, Quetext, and Plagramme.
What is Self-Plagiarism?
The phrase “self-plagiarism” may seem like an oxymoron. You may be wondering how you can be blamed for copying yourself since you generated the original work. Self-plagiarism consists of taking your own previously written content and copying it for another purpose. If you wrote an article on estate planning in 2017 and copied and pasted parts of the article for a blog post in 2021, this would be considered self-plagiarism. While nobody would accuse you of violating copyright laws with self-plagiarism, your own SEO efforts would be thwarted.
Avoid Self Plagiarism
Although it is tempting to blindly recycle an article on a topic you already wrote about, you do not want to put your work and your website at the mercy of the search engines, who frown upon copied content. Consider these ideas when rewriting a piece of your original work.
Start From Scratch
If you are writing about a topic that reflects something you have tackled in the past, be sure to start writing out your thoughts from scratch. Try to revisit the topic, even if it is familiar to you. This way, your new piece has a greater chance of being fresh and original in tone and structure. This practice assures that you will find updated content or learn something new. It also makes it more likely that you will not self-plagiarize something you wrote in the past.
Refashion Your Writing
Perhaps you need to update an old article, tweaking it for a new purpose. For this, it may be helpful to refashion your earlier work by rephrasing and restructuring the material. Avoid using the old article to guide you, or you might unknowingly copy key phrases and potentially harm your search engine standings. Always keep in mind that even self-plagiarism kills SEO.
Cite Your Previous Work
Sometimes you need to quote a passage verbatim, and when necessary to copy, be sure to cite the source. Give credit to the author, and if you yourself are the author, cite the date of the previously published article or post.
This Week’s Digital Marketing Action Steps:
- Consider checking whether any content on your law firm’s website is plagiarized through a tool such as CopyScape.
Plagiarism happens all over the internet, in many different ways. Even recycling your own work can result in self-plagiarism. Although copying text or ideas may seem like the easy way, plagiarism kills SEO, hampers your reputation, and lowers your search engine rankings. Steer clear of plagiarism by investing in original material that offers value to consumers, reflects your unique brand, and supports your marketing goals.
Annette Choti graduated from law school 20 years ago, and is now the CEO & Owner of Law Quill, a legal digital marketing agency focused on small and solo law firms. Law Quill is the only legal digital marketing agency that provides unique, SEO-optimized content, pre-packaged content, and courses for lawyers to learn SEO themselves through Law Quill Academy. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or at annette@lawquill.com