Reputation is a significant virtue regarding the authenticity of your content marketing.
Plagiarizing your content for marketing is a major concern that can cause you to lose this reputation.
Sometimes plagiarism is not deliberate, but the close similarity of content can drastically increase the chances of plagiarized work.
There are strict penalties for plagiarizing your content in the digital industry. Search engines highly prohibit publishing plagiarized content, which may result in penalization of the website with plagiarized content. You also rank lower as a result.
This post will explore the impact plagiarism could have on your content marketing strategy.
Lowering Your Rank
Copying content from other websites automatically leads to search engines lowering your rank because search engines rank websites by evaluating the authenticity of their content. When you get ranked low, you have little to no possibility of driving traffic to your site.
You must ensure your content fulfills Google’s policy of prioritizing originality over everything else.
As explained by the team at PlagiaShield, lacking originality in your content makes you a no-match for the competitors in your category because you will rank extremely low. To avoid being flagged due to plagiarism, ensure you sign up with plagiarism-checking tools for the best features that could thoroughly scan your posts and domains. You could run this plagiarism check against pre-published content that looks similar. After you ascertain that there are some pieces of your writing with similarity scores, be sure to review and rewrite before you publish. Aim to make the plagiarism score as low as possible.
Copyright Infringement
Copyright infringement is more serious and fatal compared to being de-ranked or penalized. Copyright infringement attracts lawsuits that can result in jail time or hefty fine payments. It is a serious case because the content owner requires you to credit them or at least ask for permission before you copy their content.
This is because this is an insult to their creativity and authenticity. Before you copy any content, read the terms and conditions of the copyright. The reserved rights for online content creators are complex, and you need to read about them and understand them to avoid causing you expensive consequences. Avoid plagiarism because a lawsuit against copyright infringement can cost you precious money and time as you must hire lawyers to represent you in court.
Losing Audience
Premium audiences are attracted to a site that publishes original work. The internet is full of poorly-quality sites, but when you focus on creating original content, you will drive organic traffic to your website. Content marketing is characterized by the legitimacy, innovation, and uniqueness of your information. It is even boring to realize multiple sites offer the same content.
The audiences might dig up to find the original creators of the content and subscribe to them to get the content as it is coming in before other sites copy it.
Additionally, search engine ranking is what drives visitors to your site. Visitors are unlikely to go to the second, third, or other pages in search engines. They tend to trust the content on the first page more because of its relevance. Therefore, when your rank is lowered due to plagiarism, you will be risking your position, which could attract more visitors to your site, and they could turn into actual customers. Audiences cannot trust copied work as it needs more credibility.
Penalization
Violation of search engine policies could result in de-ranking and, in the worst case, penalization. You could be risking the removal of your website from the search results. Google indexes content once, meaning duplicate content will be treated as plagiarism.
All other promotional efforts to get your content ranking will be in vain because Google removes your content from the face of light. Note that theirs is a thin line separating duplicate content from stolen content, which may affect your ranking, but one leads to a more serious cause of action: removal.
Diminished Brand Authority
The original publication of marketing content commands authority. Brand authority is defined as how your audience feels and perceives you in your marketing initiatives. The audience is likely to lean more into sites believed to command expertise and prowess in how they carry out their dealings. When it comes to products, a brand with solid authority commands confidence from the consumers; they believe whatever they are purchasing is legit.
They could even pay a premium because they think your brand offers the best in the market. The same goes for content creation; when you are original, you command authority. But this could be ruined by plagiarizing your content marketing, causing you to lose your stand on your brand having authority.
Lastly, plagiarism is a dishonor to you and your marketing initiatives. Although this could happen accidentally, always aspire to engage with original content.
You could utilize the best plagiarism checkers in the market before you publish your content and reserve your position as the highest ranking in your category.