SEO

What Happens When Your Content Is Duplicated?

Nowadays, those of us who manage different blogs and web pages, we are faced with a matter as delicate as copying and duplication of content. And not only by third parties, but even many times within our site.

The importance of content is increasingly important at all levels of digital marketing, and although a majority of us carry out good practices, it leads to an increase in plagiarism.

The problem is that this issue is not a simple dislike, or knowing how to deal with it, but it can also be a problem in terms of positioning in Google if we do not carry out the appropriate measures.

Duplicate Content: What Happens If You Get Copied?

The biggest problem that can arise when they plagiarize your content is that Google considers the copied content to be yours. And why can this happen? Well, because if that other page indexes its URL before you, Google will consider that it is the original one.

In this sense, certain problems can affect you if your content is copied and duplicated:

Bad Online Reputation: Both for the search engine and for users who are not clear about the source of the content. Looking like a “copycat” is never frowned upon.

Credibility Problems: In line with the previous point, if users believe that you copy third-party content, the credibility of your brand will be greatly affected.

Bad SEO Positioning: If Google considers that you copy texts from others, your positioning in the SERPs will quickly be affected. This is also why reputable SEO agencies like comradeweb.com is recommended for SERP.

What Is Duplicate Content?

Before talking about how to avoid these situations, we are going to clarify what exactly is duplicate content on the Internet, and what two types of plagiarists we are mainly going to find.

The duplicate content is any textual or graphical content used on a website or blog, without citing the source, and this being a copy of the original. It does not matter the quality of this, or if the copy is of the entire work or part of it.

Conscious Copying: This type of plagiarism is the most blatant, and also the least frequent. These are users who directly copy the content of others, doing it in bad faith and publishing everything as if it were original.

Unconscious Copying: Unconscious plagiarism is the one that appears the most times, and it is just as serious although the person who copies the content is not aware of the problem. It occurs when someone searches for sources of information on the Internet, for example, and directly copies parts of those texts to use them in their content. He does not copy the entire work, but does copy enough to be classified as a duplicate content.

Visually, plagiarism is more difficult to detect, since search engines and other similar programs cannot read the information in this type of content. But, for its part, the textual content is easily detectable, and there are tools to detect it such as Copyscape.