Creativity v Plagiarism
All that hard work, and you’ve just given it away, for free. Or have you?
One thing that any developer faces constantly, is plagiarism. We spend countless hours building websites for clients, just to have some (or all) of the content we create, stolen by some low life, looking at benefiting from our hard work.
When someone is paying (well really costing, YOU) $88 an hour (going up to $100 per hour on January 1,2019), for me to create not only a decent website, but provide a ‘story’ for their site – that is, to word their ‘about us’, ‘services’ (etc) pages to create a unique website that encompasses their business and services to the public, to then have that information stolen, is theft, plain and simple.
People think (about themselves), oh wow, “I’m really stupid (obviously), and cannot think of what to write, I’ll copy it from another website that describes what I want people to think I do”, that is, content that was created by a professional, and PAID for by someone else.
We could just end it there, but it doesn’t end there.
If for example, I create a website for a plumber, and the site looks good, content is great, it’s fast loading and the client is happy and they have some SEO (search engine optimization) work done to boost it’s presence in search engines like Google, all that hard work could come undone after search engines like Google, send its’ bots to the new website and find out that ‘identical content’ (re plagiarism) is all over the website, all because someone copy and pasted (stole) the content from another website.
If Google, for example, deems that the original work is the plagiarized content, that website gets punished, through lower ranking – if it ranks at all!
If you have a website built by another developer, and THEY are responsible for ALL of your content, and THEY copy and paste content from other websites, YOU have wasted your money. On the flip side, if you’ve provided content that YOU stole from other websites, and tell the developer to use it, once again, YOU have wasted your money.
Google, is a pretty smart company. They employ fantastic techs, that develop great, innovative code that picks up on work that is so obviously plagiarized. There are tools available online to not only find out if your content was copied from another website, but there are also tools to report this to most search engines.
What do I do to combat the possibility of someone copying my content? Well, the moment I build a site, I submit that sites’ content to Google (being the major and superior search engine), and Googles’ bot take a snapshot of my work. If Google discovers that my content is copied TO another website, it won’t rank THAT website (punished). Simple. That’s just one way to protect your content.
Knowing that a website will suffer in rankings due to copied content (plagiarism), if your developer OR you decide to go down that ‘I’m not creative, nor professional enough to care’ route, well, you’ve wasted your money.
The only time you wouldn’t have wasted money, is if EVERYONE knows your website, and they just go to www…….
Well, we all know that not everyone knows you and your website, and if they did, why have the website built WITH the copied content?
There are no shortcuts to building websites. Paying a company good money, to NOT be ranked – and by being ranked, I’m not talking about being on page 100, is just crazy. Well, if you’re willing to do it, I guess YOU are crazy?
The upside to people plagiarizing content, is that if, for example, site A is copied by site B, C, D, E, F, G H etc, Google (for example) will automatically know and rank higher ‘site A’, because they automatically know that site A is the most authoritative site, BECAUSE it is the one everyone is copying!
So then, what is the point of doing it? Well, some people just have websites built to make themselves look good, to try and fool others into believing they ‘actually’ do something. These people, are considered con-artists.
If, on the other hand, you are legit and believe it will give you a short term (matter of days) boost to rank your site, so be it. Websites are a long term, on-going investment.
This is why I don’t need to advertise, it’s why I don’t need to worry about ranking high, although I do for certain things. Google understands that my content is unique. I build fast websites, that look good, function well, and most of all, work for my clients.
At Crain, our motto is simple;
Think. Be Different.
This is why I can afford to be selective, choosing to work only with clients that allow me the freedom to do my thing, and they are more than happy to pay me for my services. I’m not in this ‘game’ to make a quick buck, at the expense of others.
As I stated earlier in this post, there are tools to combat plagiarism. You may find the article below on Shout Me Loud interesting – they have some very interesting posts. There, you”ll find out how and where to report the websites that are stealing content from you.
If you are reading this out of pure interest, thanks for reading, and I hope it was useful in some way.
If you are reading this and are wondering ‘how do I know if a website is copying content?’, simply highlight a sentence and right click with your mouse (I use Chrome), and simply click onto ‘Search Google for…..’ and if it’s copied, Google will provide the results.
Perhaps, it’s even good to highlight some of your own content occasionally, if you notice a drop in rankings – it may be that someone copied your content, and ‘you’ are being punished in rankings.
As always, if you need to contact me regarding any WordPress issues, contact me using the contact link at the top of the page.
