Do you check your content for plagiarism?

Do you check your content for plagiarism? When commissioning writers to produce content, whether this is by freelancers like myself or full-time employees in your organisation, it’s really important to check whether aspects of your content constitute plagiarism.

This is because plagiarism impacts SEO. The more of your content that is plagiarised, the more that Google and other search engines will penalise your content’s SEO ranking, and this will ultimately impact how many people discover and read your content.

Plagiarism can occur intentionally or unintentionally, not every instance of plagiarism is malicious. But as somebody who commissions content, it’s in your best interest to run your content through a plagiarism checker. Free tools are available online such as Plagiarism Detector and Plagiarisma but these usually come with a limit to their use. There are also paid tools such as Grammarly (which I use) and PlagScan which are more thorough in their feedback.

Simply running your content through a plagiarism checker is easy and you can use this info to guide your decision-making. You don’t need to worry about quotes or facts that include a citation, but if an entire paragraph has been copied and pasted, this is cause for concern.

While plagiarism is not the only factor that Google takes into account when determining SEO, it’s in your best interest to identify plagiarism where it occurs. Whether done intentionally or unintentionally, spotting plagiarism will give you and your writer the chance to edit your content and create something more likely to be discovered by your target audience. #contentmarketing