The Benefits of Publishing Original Content and the Penalties of Plagiarism in Terms of SEO and Audience Growth

Whatever SEO techniques you use, finally it comes to the quality of your content. Unique content means you have tailored specific content for specific people based on your brilliant keyword planning. If you are recognized for your plagiarism, it will create a bad image for your brand, website, or profile, with many other consequences as well.

There are many benefits of unique content on your website. Content is the most important factor that affects you directly in SEO. If you have a very nicely designed website but the content is duplicated, then it's better to create no content at all. 

Your website should contain fresh and unique content based on your niche. Unique content takes less time to rank higher as compared to duplicated content. So it is very important for a website to have unique content to rank in search engines.

The main importance of content in SEO is that it will improve the website ranking in search engine results pages. There are numerous types of content you can provide, including text, videos, books, downloadables, images, etc. 

However, the quality of your content will determine the effect on your rankings in search engine results pages. Thus, providing unique and relevant content to your website visitors is one of the most important aspects of SEO.

What is Plagiarism?

You probably already know what plagiarism is, but if you don't, then it is defined as 'the practice of taking some else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own". It is basically copying or stealing someone else's work. 

Plagiarism is always frowned upon, not just in terms of SEO, but also in terms of general writing or content producing. Sometimes there are major consequences for plagiarists. In some countries, it is a punishable offense, in terms of SEO, you can get penalized, and in some cases, you can get into legal battles for plagiarism depending on what had been plagiarised.

Audience

Users don't want to see the same content in all the webpages listed in the SERP (search engine result page). They come out of a website and go to the next one in order to find different content. To emphasize this, Google punishes websites with plagiarised content.

Unique, relevant content is a great way to show the expertise and knowledge about your business. The more website visitors, the more likely they want to do business with you. More business means more revenue and hence more profit.

Your audience is not stupid they will be able to recognize if something about your content looks really similar to something they've already seen or read, and when this happens, they'll quickly exit your website and go to the next one, thus increasing your bounce rate.

The first important component is that the content must be meaningful and comprehensive. Publish actual content that your viewers can appreciate.

 

The second component is longer content that tends to be shared more on social media as compared to shorter articles, and more shares will result in rich backlinks to your website which tells search engine algorithms that your site has valuable content. This results in better SERP ranks.

Google Rank

First of all, it is not a good practice to steal the content of other website and Google is against plagiarism. If found Google may penalize/de-rank your website.

Google craves unique content that tells a different story, that can explain something from a new viewpoint, that can help readers in ways that other people haven't been able to, to entertain them in new ways, etc.

Keep in mind that Google and other search engines have technology that recognizes plagiarised content in every form, whether it is an article, music, a video, a document, or even a picture.

For example, the location and colors of pixels on every image that gets posted online are analyzed by search engines, and plagiarised images are detected.

Another example is how Youtube doesn't allow a lot of music from real musicians on unofficial videos, which leads to copyright strikes, because youtube can detect pitch changes, lyrics, and frequencies matching original songs.

Unique and well-written content is incredibly important for more reasons than just SEO. If you are providing useful, original content that is rich in keywords (but not too rich) then Google, as well as your viewer will be happy to recommend your site.

When you offer something unique and leverage it correctly, you can rank very high on SERPs based on a very low bounce rate and not just having good, fast loading websites and/or backlinks.

Unique content in SEO recognizes that you didn’t duplicate/plagiarize any existing content on websites. 

As far as you can play around with high search volume keywords in your content, you are in a safe zone.

Think about why news websites are always ranking. They constantly produce new images, stories, infographics, and podcasts about various topics. Almost every story will contain never before seen images that someone took a picture of.

Major Consequences of Plagiarism

According to Google's Support FAQ on the topic:

What are the consequences of copyright infringement?

For Google, the consequences of copyright infringement are simple. We comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under this law, we may, when properly notified, disable access to content that violates applicable copyright law.

If we receive a valid infringement notification identifying content associated with your work, it will be removed and you may receive a strike.

In addition, copyright owners may choose to sue for infringement. In the U.S., copyright infringement may result in statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed and, in some cases, criminal penalties.

So, unless you want to risk these penalties, just create your own content, or make nothing at all.

Basically, the main advantages of Original Content are:

• Lower Bounce Rate
• Higher Google Results Page Ranking
• Avoidance of Plagiarism Disputes
• Trust from your Audience
• Greater Reach
• More Business Opportunities to Earn Revenue through sponsorships or affiliations.
• Better PageRank (On a scale from 1 to 10)
• Not being Penalised by Google (and Google Adsense)