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Is Your Website Plagiarising?

October 14, 2024
laptop showing Google home page

You’ve been surfing for a while and ran across a competitor’s website that put in words exactly what you want to say about your business. It’s perfect and you decide to use it on your website.

All good, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Google checks websites for plagiarism and if you use content from another website, that is plagiarism. Google will ding your page rank for that and knock your website lower in the search engine rankings.

Ok, so you can quote the website and reference them, like you would in a paper for school, right?

Yes. You need to use a tag called blockquote in your HTML. This indicates to Google that you are quoting someone else and not trying to plagiarize their copy. If you use WordPress, you can do this with the Quote block in the text editor. Other website builders will have similar functionality so you can quote other websites. Make sure you include a link to the website on your page.

Also, let’s say you have two websites for the same business, that have identical content. One of those two websites will rank lower because as far as Google is concerned, one of the websites is plagiarizing. It will probably ding the newer website as the plagiarizing website. However, this can avoided if you add a canonical link to the website you consider your primary website. You can add a canonical to a WordPress site using a SEO plugin, such as Yoast or All in One SEO. Other website builders will typically have a way you can add a canonical too.

As always, if you need SEO work done, contact a SEO Web Designer/Developer like me!

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