Creating original content is a tried-and-true way to attract visitors to a website, and it also has beneficial effects on search engine optimization by strengthening your domain’s perceived quality and creating opportunities to receive backlinks from other trusted domains. However, low-quality content can reflect badly on your website, reducing visitor engagement. Plagiarism is not only bad for your reputation, but it can also have a negative SEO impact. Being able to detect potential problems with your content can help you improve your website.

How Plagiarism damages SEO

Search engines are more intelligent than ever. Complex algorithms can search text from all over the Web and find similar or identical passages on different websites, and they are capable of recognizing the original source by referencing the date of publication, domain reputation, and relative traffic. If keywords contained within plagiarized content are driving search results, they will rank higher for the original source, making other pages with the same content trail behind.

Sites that consistently feature plagiarized content will be considered less reliable in general, and if sites present themselves falsely, they may be labelled as using deceptive or misleading practices, which has a significant negative impact on SEO.

How to Detect Possible Plagiarism

Searching text online to find cases of plagiarism is not practical, but many tools exist to help websites detect plagiarism and duplicate text by searching and comparing to text found all over the Internet. You can use the tool of your choice to paste blocks of text that you want to scan for plagiarism or upload a text file.

Free online tools that can immediately be used to detect plagiarized text are available from Grammarly, SmallSEOTools, Search Engine Reports, and other sites. Other checkers such as Copyleaks may require signup but allow websites to scan more content at once. Integrated plugins for your site may save time by allowing you to instantly check pages for signs of plagiarism before publishing.

Staying Aware of Similar Content

Businesses with competitors in the same field are likely to use a lot of the same terminology and phrasing while trying to optimize their websites for certain keywords that potential customers are looking for. Plagiarism is only a concern if the same words are used to an unmistakable degree, but care should be taken to maintain a unique presentation that makes your content stand out. If you are targeting certain keywords, it’s a good idea to view competitor pages that show up in search results for the same keyword. It might even reveal that your content is being plagiarized by others.

Read also:-6 Evergreen Content ideas that will boost your traffic

The Value of Good Spelling & Grammar in Content

Besides making it easier to read, having content that uses correct spelling and grammar creates an appearance of professionalism that identifies your content as reliable and trustworthy.

Some readers may be turned off by ungrammatical writing, which not only causes them to leave the page sooner but causes a cascading effect on search algorithms. Google can tell that searchers continue looking through search results for other options, which tells Google that visitors did not find what they were looking for on your page. This leads to downranking for the same keywords in the future.

Addressing Spelling and Grammar

Running a spell checker to automatically find spelling and grammar issues is the easiest way to address mistakes that could be hurting your site’s reputation. Grammarly’s grammar checker lets you paste text to check for spelling, grammar, and punctuation issues for free. In addition to running spell-checkers before publishing new content, it’s advisable to run a bulk spell checker for your site to find out if there are lingering issues. A readability checker such as Hemingway can also help improve the quality of writing in your content.

Scanning the content on your site for plagiarism and low-quality writing can help identify reasons why your content is not as successful as it could be in bringing traffic to your domain. Original, readable, and helpful content can make a site stand out and attract attention through organic search traffic and backlinks.