How Plagiarized Content Affects Site Ranking and How to Avoid It

Do you know? One of the integral components of a successfully ranked website is its unique content. However, to succeed in the digital landscape, content creators often adopt a few shortcuts to get their websites ranked. Not knowingly, they frequently commit the practice of creating plagiarized content that badly affects their website. If a website contains plagiarized content, a search engine like Google fails to rank your website, making it harder to discover, which can cause reduced organic traffic and conversions.

Plagiarized content can damage your website’s credibility, decreasing user trust and increasing bounce rates. But if you implement the correct content strategies that result in zero plagiarism before publishing your website, you can make it the search engine’s favorite. It brings favorable rankings, and your website can align with search engine algorithms. 

This article will focus on the impact of plagiarized content on your site ranking and how you can avoid it by following a few strategies to rank your website among the top results.

How Plagiarized Content Affects Site Rankings

When you write plagiarized content for your website, it may suffer penalties from search engines. When search engine algorithms detect duplicate material on your website, they lower your website’s chances of obtaining a high position of SERP. It can even remove your website entirely from the search index. Therefore, jotting down plagiarism-free content for your website is critical.

Ways to Avoid Plagiarism

1. Check Plagiarism: 

Check your content for unexpected plagiarism before implementing content strategies that improve your site ranking. This will help you identify duplicate sentences in your writing resulting from overlapping information from multiple online sources you are unaware of. These advanced search algorithms can detect unintentionally plagiarized parts within seconds. 

Unknowingly, plagiarism can lead to severe consequences, such as the website’s de-indexing. So, it’s best to check your piece of writing to determine whether there is any unintentional plagiarism present. 

An Advanced plagiarism checker can help you check the plagiarized material. All you need is to paste your content in the writing index of the tool and hit the check plagiarism button. 

If unintentional plagiarism is detected, you can change it into a unique piece of writing.

Many plagiarism tools can highlight that specific plagiarized part of information. It will help you identify the content producing the duplication and the percentage of plagiarized portions, so instead of rephrasing the whole content, you can only target those particular sentences.

2. Conduct Research Before Writing: 

The probability of plagiarism usually increases when you don’t research the information about the content that you create for your website. People’s biggest mistake when making a website is copying content from other websites and pasting it directly onto their site. 

The search engine works smartly and detects the content from another website through its indexing algorithm. It’s better to thoroughly research the material you need to post on your website and create it from scratch. However, accessing trustful sources for conducting research is a reliable approach. 

For example, if you have a medical website offering healthcare services, you can search for data from PubMed, Google Scholarly, etc. But make sure to take an idea about the content and pen down your own words.  

3. Rephrase Your Content

The best practice is rephrasing your content to remove that unintentionally plagiarized portion from your writing. You can adopt two methods for it. The first approach for translating the content is to creatively re-write the words manually. To write words effectively from scratch, understand the meaning of searched information accurately. 

You can jot down the essential notes that deliver the main idea of the researched information. This will help you think out of the box and restructure the content according to your thoughts. Use synonyms and unique words to describe the core idea of the content. 

But if you are not good at rephrasing, you can automate this process and save time by getting help from an online paragraph rephraser that runs on an advanced AI algorithm. Paraphrasing the content with this rephrasing tool can help fit similar information to your writing style without disrupting the main idea of the content and the search engine rankings.

Top 3 Disadvantages of Plagiarized Content on Site Ranking

1. Search Engine Penalties: Plagiarized content can lead to severe penalties from search engines. Search engines, particularly Google, have sophisticated algorithms that detect duplicate content. When a site is found to be hosting plagiarized material, it can significantly drop in ranking. In some cases, the site might be removed entirely from search engine indexes, making it invisible to users and drastically reducing traffic.
2. Loss of Credibility and Trust: A website’s credibility is crucial for retaining visitors and attracting new ones. Plagiarized content can undermine this credibility, as users may question the authenticity and reliability of the site’s information. This loss of trust can lead to decreased user engagement, lower return rates, and a diminished reputation. Over time, this can negatively impact the site’s ranking as search engines consider user engagement metrics when determining rankings.
3. Negative Impact on SEO Efforts: Plagiarized content can disrupt carefully planned SEO strategies. Original, high-quality content is a key component of effective SEO, helping to attract backlinks, improve keyword relevance, and enhance user experience. When a site uses plagiarized content, it misses out on these benefits. Additionally, duplicate content can confuse search engines about which version of the content to index, leading to split link equity and diluted ranking potential. This undermines the overall SEO performance, making it harder for the site to achieve and maintain high rankings.

Conclusion

Unique content is a crucial component of a website. While creating website content, it’s essential to understand the tracking algorithms of search engines that determine the ranking of a website by indicating different factors. One such factor is content that is free from plagiarized words, which defines the website’s credibility. The strategies mentioned above are one of the best methods to avoid plagiarism. Implementing these content strategies correctly will help you avoid duplicate content and increase the chances of better search engine rankings, improved visibility, and retained audiences that build you as an authority.