Duplicate Content: You may see a photo, news story, blog content in multiple places. Sometimes, it is hard to determine where this content was originally published or originated. It may seem perfectly legal to copy other’s website content at first glance. That’s why a lot of people ask, ‘can I use website content of some else’s website content.’
The simple answer to this frequently asked question is ‘no’ unless you have obtained the permission of the author or content creator. According to law, digital content has all the copyright protection as offline content does have. Post duplicate content on another website or use it in your e-book may violate the author’s copyright. In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about duplicate content over the web. Are you ready? Let’s get into it!
What is duplicate content?
According to Google, substantive chunks of content have been published on your own website or another website that either similar or match with other content.
So your friend says, copy his work and publish on your website, it is totally a bad idea to do the same. When you publish content on your website that is already a part of another website, it is worthless in view of Google because it is not an original piece of content.
In order to make your content worth reading and rank on Google’s SERPs, create engaging content. Google wants to show more relevant results to search quires. Google may risk returning with results that have similar content each time when they indexed duplicate content.
Is it Legal to Copy Content from a Website?
However, you might not copy content from other sources unless the author permits you. But there are some exceptions too. You can include an extract with attribution in your article and link it to the original article. Highlight that content in your article.
If you don’t add citations, your reader will think that it is part of your article. It means you are claiming credit for work that belongs to someone else, which is called plagiarism, and it is illegal.
In short, you will commit copyright piracy when you publish content of someone else without their permission or appropriate license. It’s also illegal.
Also, keep in mind that if you change a few words or even alter the order of paragraphs or sentences, you are infringing on copyrighted work. To avoid copyright infringement, write on your own. If you want to mention their work as a reference, use quotation marks or link it to the original article.
Can Duplicate Content Harm Your Website’s performance?
However, Google will not penalize you if you post duplicate content, but it can harm your website’s performance. It also prevents your pages from ranking in SERPs. When Google index your website pages, it takes cues to what kind of content you have created when the users put a search query and show the most relevant pages.
When more than one website has similar content, it may dilute your link profile and affect your ranking. If you create engaging and relevant content and have high-quality backlinks, it is better than having duplicate content. Duplicate content also creates confusion as to who is the original publisher of this content or this work’s author. Moreover, it may affect your website performance too.
How much duplicate content is OK you have on-site?
If you quote an extract from someone else’s work on your website and give credit to him/her, it is OK. If you publish duplicate chunks of content without adding any additional value, it will not help your website rank in search engines and benefit your readers.
There are some common examples of duplicate content which naturally arise, including the e-commerce product description and their specifications, pages that appear more than once on your website, products that appear in multiple categories, and then use the content of other websites without permission, such as press releases, etc.
The don’ts of using duplicate content on the internet.
Google likely to stop crawling your site
Google spends a lot to crawl your website, including internet, servers, electricity, personnel, and other costs. It’s Google has probably unlimited resources. However, if your site is too big, its crawlers may stop at some point. If Google crawls your website’s pages and finds the same content that some other website has used, it will stop crawling your website. It means if your important pages have original content, it might leave them or ignore them.
Backlink dilution
If you have multiple versions of a similar page and users can access all of them, the different websites may not link to the same versions of that page. But it is still helpful for your domain, but it is not a great solution for your site to get it rank on SERPs.
Plagiarism or External Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can occur cross domains, and Google doesn’t like to show it’s the same content over and over again. That’s why it picks the original content to show its users most of the time. Duplicate content across domains can occur in different scenarios. Your focus should produce high-quality and original content.
Will this duplicate content hurt my SEO?
Bottom Line:
Duplicate content comes with copyright infringement, content devaluation, and hurt your SEO efforts. So you must focus on creating original content that has no external duplicate content. Make your content engaging, more relevant, unique, useful, and targeted to your audience. It helps you get to rank higher in search engine and prevent you from copyright violation. We hope this article gives you an overview of duplicate content and don’ts of using duplicate content on the internet. If you have any questions, please contact us today.
Can I use someone else’s website content? | Blog Article | SEO After Coffee | Greenville SC | All Rights Reserved | May 31, 2021