The word 'plagiarism' is undeniably one of the most infamous words used on the Internet. For websites hiring content writers for their needs, plagiarism is a taboo, a very sure way of getting the website heavily penalized for search engine optimization, and for the content writer to be fired from the project. However, it is interesting to know how serious a crime plagiarism is in actuality. And, of course, to find out if plagiarism is indeed a crime or not!

What is Plagiarism actually?

It is indeed remarkable to know that most of the hardcore content writers also do not know what plagiarism actually is. The definition of plagiarism in the web world is something different than is encountered in other forms of media. Here, plagiarism means duplicating content. Duplicate content, or plagiarized content, occurs when:-

(i)Content is unabashedly copy-pasted from one website to another

(ii)A portion of the content is retained while changing the rest; for example, two sentences from the content could be kept unchanged, even though the rest of the article is rewritten

(iii)A similar structure of content is maintained, though some words are changed here and there

So, plagiarism is not as simple as just copy-pasting and content writers must remember that. Some writers have a habit of taking content from another website, pasting it onto a word document and then cleverly changing the phraseology. Many times, this ploy does work. But if some sentences erroneously remain in the article unchanged, or even if the article retains the sequence of the article, it may be counted as plagiarism.

How serious a Crime is Plagiarism?

Let us understand this from the point of view of the search engines to get a better picture. Search engines index articles with their keywords, we all know that. But one important thing search engines do is that it searches the article sentence by sentence, or even sometimes, phrase by phrase. Hence, if any sentence has been previously found on another website, it would be counted as plagiarism.

Quite simply put, the search engines will not want to waste time in searching the same content over and over again, even though it is on a different website. The main purpose of the search engine is to give information to the user, and not to increase the traffic of any website. In order to save time and effort, the search engine will just mark the website with copy in it and ban it from future searches. In common Internet lingo, this is known as search engine optimization penalty. Remember that search engines do not have any personal grudges against some websites; they penalize websites only to make their own tasks at searching easier and more competent in future.

And what happens to the original website? How does the search engine know which content is original? That's simple too. The search engine will doubtless have previously searched the original website sometime, and will have already indexed it. Any un-indexed site that comes up later with identical content is definitely the plagiarized one.

What is the Price the Plagiarized Website has to pay?

Plagiarism leads to an SEO penalty. This is the worst thing to happen to any website, however big or small it may be. When a website is penalized, the search engine bad-marks it, and does not use it for further searches. The whole website may also be dumped entirely.

Since most visitors come on the website by browsing for information on search engines, this could drastically reduce the traffic of the website. It is not necessary to elaborate how detrimental that can be for destroying the business prospects of the website.

In conclusion, plagiarism is something that must be strictly avoided by all websites. For websites that are spending heavy resources and money on maintaining their websites, a simple thing like plagiarism could ruin it completely. In the world of online content, it is originality, and only originality, that counts.