It is no news that people are in the habit of just copying and pasting other people's intellectual properties. While some websites make room for people to do so with reprint rights they make available, others don't and when people use these articles and content, they commit what is known as plagiarism.

In the past, no one really cared about this. But recently - late 2007-early 2008 - Google came out with the duplicate content penalty and anyone who still thinks this doesn't work, here are 4 reasons why you ought to avoid duplicate content.

Harsh Penalty

This is often carried out by the search engines in the form of delisting the website and in some cases, blacklisting them. With this, most websites with the same content get to suffer the same fate. Most of the time, Google chooses articles based on the first date they went up.

The rest, it just shoves down or delists them completely. Therefore, if you don't want your domain name to be blacklisted, and to my knowledge, there hasn't been one that had its ban lifted- and your website removed from the search engine rankings, please avoid duplicate content completely.

Lose Customers

Most of the time, people do a quick search for products before buying. If the website doesn't show up on the search engines, they are very likely to go look for alternatives, particularly when they don't known the website address or url. You are also less likely to have older customers dissociate themselves from you as soon as word goes round that you were delisted because of duplicate content.

No Search Engine Rankings

This will never happen. Although it has been said that it doesn't really matter if the content are just on no more than 10 websites, the truth is that you do not want to get in trouble by having all those search engine rankings that you probably spent a lot of money and time on getting delisted or moved to the 100,000th page where they will never get seen.

Lots of people with the same content

Nothing is worse than your visitors not being able to get original content that is written by you and no one else. Most of the time, people think that visitors come to their website because they get a good deal from it -and this is true- but you should never take them for granted.

If they wanted information, reviews, opinions or an objective look at a product or issue, there are tons of websites where they could get those. But they come to you because they have over time learned to trust you. Now, if they find the same content available all over many websites on your website, how do you think they would feel? Disappointed maybe! This will definitely lead to a lack of trust.

Now, if you don't want all these to happen to you, you should take the time to create your own content. If doing it yourself is difficult, hire a web content writer with proven results and you won't have to worry about your content needs anymore.