The words ‘duplicate content penalty’ strike fear in the hearts of many online business owners, yet there are still some people who think that copying content is not a crime. If you are one of the latter, then this article is for you. We will discuss in detail what duplicate content is, its consequences, and how one should check for plagiarism.

 

What Is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a substantive block of identical content that can be found on a single domain or across various domains. Duplicate content can be both intentional and unintentional. In either case, Google issues a duplicate content penalty, which should be avoided at all costs.

 

How Does Duplicate Content Occur?

Duplicate content occurs in a lot of different instances. If you have a website that has several landing pages targeted to different locations, you may want to copy content and just change the name of the state or city you are targeting. This is a practice followed by marketers who have services and products specialized according to locations and hence cannot rely on a single web page. While this would certainly be convenient, but unfortunately, it clutters your site with similar pages. The search engine sees these webpages as duplicate pages.

Duplicate content also takes place when a company has multiple websites. If the products fall in the same category, the pages they copy might be the exact same, while if the products vary, they may tweak words a little.

If your company thinks that running two URLs with identical sites will attract more traffic, I have some bad news – the content is the same for both sites, and it will still be considered a duplicate. Google penalizes both websites and not just one. So, this may hurt your business.

Copying content from competitors’ websites is perhaps the worst form of duplication. If your competitor outperforms you and has a higher ranking on search engines, it does not mean you can copy them and achieve the same status as theirs. Copying content will only make your position worse.

Why Is Duplicate Content an Issue?

Some companies wonder why duplicate content is even a problem, especially if it is at their own site. The real problem arises when content is stolen from other sources. Look at this way; you have spent a lot of time and effort trying to create eye-catching content. How would you feel when you find the same published content on someone else’s website?

Search engines will detect plagiarism on both the owner’s and the offender’s website, so the original author is also at risk. Also, a search engine would fail to recognize which page should be served to searchers when there is more than one similar web page.

Google does not value duplicate content, which can eventually hurt your rankings. For your business, it could mean less traffic, fewer leads, and less revenue.

So, how to get rid of plagiarists and problems brought about by duplicate content? Regularly check for plagiarism.

 

How to Check For Plagiarism?

Fortunately, we have an escape from plagiarism, and that is through plagiarism checking tools. These are programs designed to search identical words and sentences around the web. Where a similar text is matched with the given text, it flags.

These tools have helped online marketers and bloggers to check for plagiarism conveniently and accurately. People swear by this incredible tool as it has brought a massive improvement in their businesses. You can even check for plagiarism to track down plagiarists.

These tools are best served in two stages. First, when you create content for your online site. You should pass your content through these tools to check for plagiarism before finally publishing it. Secondly, you should run regular plagiarism checks on your website to ensure the content has not been stolen.

 

Best Tools to Check For Plagiarism

You will come across a lot of great plagiarism checking tools in the market, and each has its own features. Here, we will talk about the three popular plagiarism checking tools that you can use to check for plagiarism.

–         PREPOSTSEO

The Prepostseo plagiarism checker is the answer to the growing number of writers who plagiarize the work of others.

It is the best plagiarism checker tool because;

1. It is a completely free tool for 1000 words
2. It allows to cite plagiarized source

It will save you the hours you would have spent otherwise quoting and citing your content.

Using this feature, writers can find if there are any plagiarized sentences that need to be quoted or paraphrased further.

–          SmallSEOTools

The plagiarism checker offered by SST is the best for website owners and online marketers. Smallseotools.com detect plagiarism from sites free online. This plagiarism tool checks every sentence of your given content or URL and then runs a plagiarism check on each sentence and shows you results sentence wise as well.

–          Quetext

If you don’t mind a monthly subscription, then you may also opt for Quetext. This plagiarism checker tool text scans against billions of databases and online books. The tool is extremely advanced and detects paraphrased sentences as well.

–          Grammarly

Grammarly is another great invention in the plagiarism checking tools industry but comes with a price. Their subscription will not only give you access to the plagiarism checking tool but also grammar checking services.

 

Final Words

Duplication in a writing can destroy the fame of a writer or a website within no time. That’s why it is essential for a person to check for plagiarism before publishing it over the web. The mentioned-above tools may help you in detecting the similarity in content and assist you in creating unique and great content.