Whether plagiarized content on a website is unintentional or someone copied the content from your website, it has to be addressed and managed properly.

Even, if you have a website for a small company; the website is in danger to the SEO when there is plagiarized content.

In this article, we will help you know about duplicate content, the way to determine, and the way to handle the duplicate content problems properly.

What causes Plagiarized content?

Copied content is the part of the article that is completely similar to another while this is not obvious that the content would be the same as the source content. If you make some minor changes to the content but the meaning is the same, it would be considered paraphrased plagiarism.

This is common to have a similar piece of content that may have similar thoughts to another article and in some situations, they may be unavoidable.

Over the website, there can be two types of plagiarism that are possible to occur on your site. These can be:

• Internal copied content: occurs when one page consists of the content of another page or post and it can also be considered as “Self-Plagiarism”.
• External Copied Content: This happens when content is copied from an external source or have a concept regards to another domain

Both internal and external copy content can be directly plagiarized or paraphrased plagiarized.

How to check plagiarism?

Using online tools, you can easily check plagiarism free of cost and this will lead you to publish the original content. The online tools will compare your writing with the existing published articles and this way, you get the chance to check if your writing contains any copied content.

When it compares your writing, it obtains the percentage of unique and plagiarized content and this probably decides the uniqueness of the content.

Why Duplicate Content Is Bad For SEO?

Officially, Google doesn’t inflict a penalty for duplicate content. But it will find similar content and, in this way, you may lose the ranking of your web pages in the SERPs.

A plagiarized content forces Google and another search engine to select which one of the same pages it must rank at the top positions.

To select the original publisher of the content, Google may consider the article that was published and indexed first. This means, if you are copying the content of another indexed article then you might have to face the penalty from Google for using the same content again.

This is just a single reason why duplicate content is bad for SEO but there a lot of reasons to avoid the copied content on your website. Below are some cases where you should avoid this type of content.

Internal Plagiarism issues

·      The elements of the On-Page issues

To prevent duplicate content issues, Ensure That each page in your website has:

• A unique title of the web page which shouldn’t be matched with another page’s title
• Unique heading, keywords, as well as title to avoid confusing search engine

The page title, meta description, and other On-page factors are although very less in quantity onto a webpage. But it is safer to maintain your site with the original content as much as you can.

Additionally, if you have more unique content then search engines would get more chances to rank your site just like having different Meta descriptions will increase the opportunities of ranking.

If you can’t compose an exceptional meta description to every page as you’ve got a lot of pages, then it would be better to remove the Meta-description.

Upon not having a Meta Description, Google chooses snippets out of the articles and introduces it as the meta tag description anyhow.

 But, it’s still superior to compose a personalized meta description if you’re able to sense it’s a crucial part of forcing click-throughs and keyword adjustment.

·      Descriptions of the Product and Tool Content

E-Commerce business is only successful if its SEO is enough to rank in the top position and get more organic traffic. If your website is completely optimized to unique elements, there are chances of ranking higher especially in the top 3 positions.

Understandably, producing unique product descriptions can be hard for several eCommerce businesses, since it may take a great deal of time to compose the first descriptions for every single product on a website.

Now, it can quite difficult for making original content and Meta-Descriptions for each of your products but this is necessary for every eCommerce site.

On the other side, if you market your products through third-party merchant sites (Like Amazon, eBay) by offering your product then provide each source with a special description.

External Copied Content Issues

The external issues are more important to be solved because not only the search engine may penalize but the original author can also have a case on your website for using their content.

There are different external plagiarism types and some of them are mentioned below:

·      Direct copying and Pasting of content

Taking some sentences from a website and using it in your writing along with the quotation marks or citation may not lead to plagiarism but if you are copying long paragraphs or a complete article then it would be bad for your SEO and website.

This is considered Direct Plagiarism and usually, it is easily detectable there are plagiarism checkers available online that quickly find the source from where your content is matched or find similar.

·      Syndicate Content

The syndicated content is also plagiarism but not by you but by another web owner. This happens when somebody copies your content and posts it on their website.

This is not a problem for the search engine in terms of your website but it can disturb the user experience of your website.

For example, if a user found that your content is similar to another article, whether you have original content and published it before others, the user may consider your content to be duplicate. The best way to deal with this is to find who is copying your content (using a plagiarism checker) and ask for the citation or removal of the content. This may lead to a backlink to your site and may increase the authority of your site.