Creating an engaging piece of content is an art. It is a creative process that can only be effective if you are being true to yourself.
Plagiarism is the biggest obstacle in the way of true creative achievement.
Plagiarism is the act of stealing someone else’s work and presenting it as your own.
By using plagiarized content, you create a replica of original content and use it without permission from the original content creator.
Using plagiarized content is wrong and it has a wide range of legal, professional, and ethical consequences.
Individuals and organizations involved in using plagiarized content lose all their credibility and respect.
Plagiarism can also get you to face legal and monetary consequences because of copyright infringement.
Let’s take a brief look at some of the most important consequences of Plagiarism and how you can avoid it in the digital landscape
Consequences of Plagiarism
There are a lot of risky consequences of plagiarism such as bad brand reputation, a negative effect on SEO, a bad effect on an individual’s creative skills, lack of trust, and major legal consequences.
1. Bad for Brand Reputation
Using plagiarized content will ruin your brand reputation. It will destroy the credibility of your business in the eyes of your target market and they’ll stop trusting your services.
Running a business is not easy. People running an online platform need to create a lot of unique content to gain and maintain the top position on search engines.
Fresh content is the only way to do that. If you use plagiarized content and publish it on your business website, it will create a bad image of your business in the eyes of your audience.
2. Destroys SEO Efforts
SEO and Content go hand in hand. In fact, content optimization is one of the most important components of SEO.
When doing SEO for your website, removing plagiarism from the content should be at the top of your content optimization checklist.
If you use content that is not unique, it will mess up all your SEO efforts. When search engines pick plagiarized content on your site or pointing towards your site, they take it as a violation of their copyright policy.
So, if you don’t want all your SEO efforts to go to waste, you should make sure that you only publish plagiarism-free content on your site.
There are a lot of plagiarism detection software out there that you can use to detect plagiarism from the content and remove it.
3. Affects your Creative Skills
If you are not working from the bottom of your heart for coming up with creative content and you always rely on Plagiarized content, it will start affecting your creative skills.
The use of plagiarized content has a considerable effect on creative skills. Stealing someone else’s work fills you up with a feeling of guilt on a subconscious level. This feeling doesn’t let you work to the best of your abilities.
The more you engage in plagiarism, the weaker your Mental faculties get. And with time, you completely lose the ability to create something unique and that you can call your own.
4. Affect your Site’s Ranking
Google and other search engines are strictly against the use of Plagiarized content. Google is always monitoring the entire web to ensure that the use of plagiarized content is kept to a minimum.
If Google detects the presence of Plagiarized content on your site, it will take your platform down from the top positions in the search engine. Using fresh and unique content is essential for maintaining a good ranking on the search engines.
Trying to rank using Plagiarized content is going to have a bad impact on the position of your website at SERPs. You need to be careful when publishing any kind of content online to make sure that it is plagiarism-free.
5. Legal Consequences
Government authorities as well as search engines are trying their best to uphold the established copyright laws.
According to copyright law, if a person uses someone else’s work without citation or references, they can get sued by the original content creator.
Plagiarism is punishable by law. It is a legal issue that can make you eligible for a legal penalty. The creator of the original content can also ask for monetary compensation from the person involved in plagiarism which the plagiarist will be obligated to pay.
6. Bad for Professional Reputation
Being a content creator is quite fulfilling. If you do it with malicious intent and make use of plagiarized content with your work, it can prove to be quite bad for a person’s or company’s professional reputation.
This is especially important for freelance writers who write to earn a living. Plagiarism is the quickest way to lose prospects which has the potential to make your career go downhill.
Whether you are a freelance writer, an author, or a journalist, using plagiarized content won’t be good for your professional reputation.
How to Avoid Plagiarism
- Use a Plagiarism Checker
If you want to identify plagiarism in a piece of writing, you can use a plagiarism checker online for that.
Once you have identified the plagiarism using this checker, you may remove it from the content to make it 100% unique and plagiarism-free.
- Use Paraphrasing Tools
Paraphrasing tools offer you a simple and easy way of removing plagiarism from the content. These tools are quite great at creating unique content from the existing ones. You can easily rephrase sentences with trustworthy paraphrasing tools and make your content very unique.
Using the paraphrasing tools, you can easily rewrite complete essays and web copies which will be 100% unique and plagiarism-free.
There are a lot of paraphrasing tools out there. We highly recommend Paraphraser.io for creating plagiarism-free content. This tool is free, fast, and effective at rephrasing existing content.
Final Words
The use of plagiarized content has become more common now than you’d think. But it is still wrong, nonetheless.
You need to make sure that the content you are using on all your platforms is unique and plagiarism-free. This is the only way you can make your services stand out from the rest.
