Every writer should be wary of the famous “P” word: Plagiarism. It is the reason why students get expelled from universities and famous, successful authors are left without a penny. With the ease of use provided by tools such as Copyscape, one would think that the days of plagiarism are over, but the truth is that the path there is still long.
Plagiarism in Content
One of the most active fields for this kind of anti-literary behavior is content marketing. Often, one company within a certain industry hires a writer to research their products and create content that appeals to the interested market. The content does its job, so other companies within the same industry take it and post it onto their own websites, thinking, “why not?”.
What Copied Content Does
This type of content is much more present in certain industries than it is in others, but it always has the same effect on the audience: it distances them. When a reader, who was once interested enough in your business to go to your website and try to get more information about the product or service they would like to acquire, sees the exact same information they saw on the last website they visited, they feel cheated.
It should go without saying that making your customers feel cheated is a pretty poor way to begin a productive relationship with them. You lose credibility, and they lose faith. Otherwise put, nobody gets what they wanted, and it is a pity to know that the only thing standing between this disappointment and the satisfaction of both parties is the cost of having original content created.
Besides, plagiarism is penalized by Google and the other search engines as well. Although marketers no longer build their strategy exclusively around the search engines, being thrown even one page behind in search engines results is in no way profitable. It may bring about losses of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, while having the new content created may barely reach a couple of hundreds dollars.
