Cutting Out the Copy/Paste Habit: Why You Should Never Post Duplicated Content Online
Chances are that you’ve heard from us or from almost anyone else with experience in digital marketing that blogging is a powerful way to bring traffic to your website. As with most tasks, however, there is a right way and a wrong way to build a robust blog. Many companies choose to create blog posts by copying content from other websites and pasting it onto their own. They believe that online content is free to use and that this is a quick and easy way to build their site. Unfortunately, both of these assumptions are incorrect. For several reasons, duplicating someone else’s content will only hurt your business.
Search Engine Optimization
For most companies who post blog articles on their websites, their primary purpose is to improve their search engine optimization, or SEO. In reality, your SEO will suffer from duplicate content. When Google sees multiple web pages with the same information, the search engine doesn’t know where to rank them because they both have equally relevant information. The result is that both your own site and the site you copied from will be less likely to rank well in search results.
You are also likely to get low-quality content if you are copying from other sites. You don’t know when the other site wrote their content. That means they could be using outdated SEO tactics. If their blog was poorly optimized, yours will be too.
Business Ethics
Poor search engine optimization is one unfortunate result of copying your blog content from other websites, but it doesn’t end there. This practice is an ethical problem as well. Despite a surprisingly common perception, content you find online is just as restricted under copyright law as content you would find in a book. Copying blogs or other digital writing is still plagiarism because you’re stealing the work that another company created or purchased from a writer. In the process, you’re harming that company’s SEO as well.
Public Perception
We don’t need to tell you that in this era of social media, if a business has unethical practices, someone will eventually uncover it and spread the word. Plagiarism isn’t exactly on the same level as workplace harassment or employee mistreatment, but it isn’t worth the risk. It would take a simple Google search for someone to notice that your content is copied, and the bad publicity could damage your business in a way that will never fully go away. If you are in a competitive industry that gives your customers a long list of alternatives, that can be especially harmful.
How to Get Original, Effective Content
When it comes down to it, there is no shortcut to driving in traffic with high-quality content. The only way to reap the benefits of an informative, hearty blog is to create your own original blogs using information from reliable sources and expert search engine optimization. If writing and SEO aren’t your specialties, call McCauley Marketing Services to schedule a meeting and discuss your needs.