Any writer’s worst nightmare is watching someone else take credit for their work through claiming an ownership for the intellectual property. This is something we, as bloggers, website owners and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) content contributors have learned to face and suffer as more and more websites are trying to accelerate their popularity by stealing SEO Content from several websites.
Quite depressed, they seem to get away with this too. Often than not, you might find yourself worried as to why your meticulously written guide or article does not draw as much traffic as it should. If you went and typed in an excerpt from your article and searched it on any of the search engines, you might come across few hits that closely resemble what you originally wrote in your article. That, my friends, is called stealing content and is responsible for your suffering while someone else basks in the fruits of your hard work.
Why Is Stolen Content So Popular?
Image Source
As is expected, the reason people do this is to increase the visitors to their websites and to boost their popularity. Through other keyword searching tools, these plagiarists are able to decipher which keyword is drawing the most attention, and they quickly plagiarize the good articles revolving around the particular keyword. They might not copy the entire thing word-to-word, they are of course smarter than that. Instead, they will change the main words, the style, or paraphrase a few things to minimize the chances of anyone detecting that it is a rip-off.
How Google Deals (and Punishes) Copied Contents?
Image Source
Thankfully, Google came up with its set of algorithm called Panda, which has a knack for detecting such copied content. It goes through the content published, scanning it for any signs of plagiarism or duplication. If it detects a link to be guilty, it immediately labels it as spam and indexes it. While this is good news, the bad news is that Panda may not always be able to tell correctly, which the original content is and which one is the copy. Of course, it will go through the date each article was published and label the later one as spam, but these plagiarists are clever enough to have somehow devised a method to evade this check and present their content as the original one. Again, no worries as Google has kept all options open for you. If such is the case, then you can always appeal to Google through a complaint to reverse their decision, and they will have a second thorough look. Although you would have already suffered decreased traffic due to the duplicate content, the comfort lies in knowing that the next time someone searches for the particular keyword your content was based upon, they will only land upon your article containing the specific information than a dozen others. Please note that Google will only label the particular page or content as spam and not the entire website. However, that is enough to plummet greatly the website’s ranking.
Can Web-content writers escape Panda?
One other thing SEO writers also worry about is: what if Panda is unable to detect someone copied their particular article? One thing you can do is that if you suspect your article to be receiving less traffic then search a part or excerpt from it. If you come across any similar hits, then you can always report them to Google and Panda is sure to label them as spam. Another way is to use Google Alerts or other tools which detect copied material. You just have to enter the heading of your article and Google Alert will send you links to all the articles that have the same heading or title. If you find any link having copied your content, you may, of course, report it.
However, something commendable Panda is doing to improve this shortcoming is that it is constantly revising and updating its algorithm to be able to detect more and more stolen content. Google also sends out questionnaires and surveys for people to fill in which they may list down websites they have found to plagiarize material. Of course, Google has a thousand articles to go through every hour, but this revision will bring it more perceptive towards detecting these mishaps very soon!
