Have you ever refrained from copying in a test just to avoid getting caught with the same answers? In the digital world too, this scenario very much exists!
The term ‘plagiarism’ may sound scary as it can have legal consequences and if it does, that is no surprise. With the amount of content that is generated and published online, whether it is a blog, marketing copy or website content, is vast. Therefore, a lot of smaller brands tend to reach the level of industry giants, sometimes unethically by copying content leading to plagiarism. The only difference between duplicate content and plagiarism is that the former can exist anywhere but plagiarism is when content is intentionally copied and the ownership is forged, such as in case of plagiarising copyrighted content. You would be surprised to know that regardless of how bad this sound, it does happen.
An Introspective Into Copying Vs Creating
However, knowing the consequences, genuine brands with a vision avoid duplicate content at all cost and for good reason. In the digital era that we live in, there is room to use creativity at its best and make your brand stand out. The best space to show this creativity and why your business is better than the rest is on your website via content and also marketing copies across your business’s social media handles. Even so, content duplication can arise easily for various different reasons.
While there is no penalty imposed by search engines for duplicate content, it can affect a website’s SEO ranking. For example, if you have got great content but someone else uses an exact sentence that is included in your content, search results may still show both URLs, making it hard for users to decide which is the relevant link they should be clicking on. If they click on the other link, the traffic that was supposed to be driven to your website ultimately ends up on some other website due to duplicate content!
In case of external duplication, there is no need to really worry if you are certain that your content is the original one over the content that is duplicated on another website. It is also possible that there may be more than one link that has copied your content. Search engines like Google have a way of dealing with such issues in which they always identify original content and rank it higher than duplicate content. This identification is done on the basis of the date of publishing that content. Among the two sets of content that has been duplicated, Google ranks the one that was published first higher.
While all the above can happen with external websites, content duplication within your website also counts, but it is certainly very different from external content duplication. With internal content duplication, there are many steps that you can take by yourself to avoid this type of repeated content that shows up in search results to users. One of the fastest ways to avoid it being recognised as duplicate content is to redirect every link of your website that shows repeated content to the original link on your website, also known as the canonical URL. Meanwhile, do not forget to add canonical link element (basically to tell search engines which link is original) to all pages that include the same exact content, making them look like duplicates.
GSS Webtech is an IT solutions provider that also specialises in content marketing and guides you in completely avoiding duplicate content. It is the best-in-class and easily qualifies as the best digital marketing agency in Mysore. Contact us now to know that we truly mean it!
