Reasons to Avoid Plagiarizing and How It Can Harm Your Website
From our earliest school years, we have all learned not to plagiarize. But what about content that isn’t copywritten but instead lives on the internet? It can be tempting to take web copy from a competitor’s website, or another business that extends far beyond your geographic area. This saves you the time and effort of generating new content. The practice of plagiary, beyond being poor form, can hurt your website’s standing with the search engines. Easily discoverable through its many bots, Google can identify plagiarized content online. This can permanently affect your standing with the search engines and in some cases can even get you banned.
Copying Content from Other Websites is an Unethical Practice
Generating fresh written copy can be a challenge for even the most skilled business. Content needs to be a healthy mix of speaking to your target audience, while also being written to maximize your search engine optimization. This can be a struggle, particularly when developing multiple pages that contain similar content. When you find a similar business targeting a different geographic area, it can be tempting to copy the content from their website to your own. After all, what are the chances that someone would notice? This is a huge mistake. Not only is it unethical practice, but it is also considered a form of theft as you take the intellectual property from another business’ website.
This type of plagiarizing can be easily discovered by the search engines, your target market, and even the business where the copy was taken from. Restructuring the verbiage and rearranging the text to make it your own is seldom good enough to pass the copy off as written by your business. Google and other top search engines have stringent penalties for plagiarism. This can include anything from a banning from search listings for certain keywords to penalties that can affect the ranking of your entire URL. Worst case scenario your site can even be banned from the search engine entirely.
Focus on Creating Your Own Content for the Website
The easiest way to avoid any form of plagiarizing, and the penalties that go along with this, is by generating fresh content for your website. Experienced writers can focus on a healthy balance of writing for your target market, while developing content that is laden with keywords that are relevant to your products and services. Well-written content that you can truly call your own is extremely valuable for your business and something that the search engines will look at favorably when ranking your site in the search results.
Reasons to Avoid Plagiarizing
At Five Star SEO we have a team of writers experienced at developing web content for businesses. Taking the time to invest in your business’ content will go a long way to giving you the ideal website, free from any intellectual theft, and a site that is best optimized for search engines. This is an important part of growing your business and generating more leads and ultimately customers.
