Plagiarism of Blogs - What to Do

"Copy from one, it's plagiarism, copy from two, it's research." Wilson Mizner. That actually is not true. Even if you take chunks of blogs from four or five different sources and publish them as is, it is still plagiarism.

As a business person who shares your content online through social media channels, you know that the search engines do not react favorably to duplicate blog content. If you want to achieve a high ranking in the search engines, you need to continually publish original content that in no way resembles the content of others.

The work that goes into the writing

Writing an original blog articles requires a great deal of time and effort on your part. A really effective and helpful blog article has accurate information, is relevant to the needs and wants of the people in your niche whom you are trying touch, must have strong research to support it, must be grammatically correct, must hold some serious value and must be interesting enough for other people to want to read it and then look for more articles from you to read. Additionally, you must also have the correct type and amount of keywords in your blog article as well as having them placed strategically so that they are recognized favorably by the search engines and will be placed high in the rankings.

If your article is written correctly, that means that it needs to satisfy your readers and the search engines. In other words, it must look pretty and actually be effective at the same time. You should not expect the first draft of the article to be the last draft. Once you have written what you think is your final draft, it is not a bad idea to sleep on it overnight and then go back to it. Inevitably, you will find additional content that you want to tweak.

Once your article is perfect in your eyes, you will syndicate it to article directories and social media channels that are appropriate for your niche. Your reward for doing that will hopefully be good-quality back links that will lead back to your website, where your readers will start to get to know you and your business better and with whom you will form relationships.

Taking the easy road

What has just been described is what happens in the best of all possible worlds. Unfortunately, that is not what happens all of the time in this world. In this world, many people read the content of other people, really find it interesting, and, in their desire to build their own online reputation, lift those articles directly and at times in their entirety, and post them on their own website as their own content. They don't give any thought to proper attribution or credit to the proper person at all. There are even those people who plagiarize entire articles and state plainly that they are articles that they have written without any help from anyone.

If the benefit of the doubt were to be given to the alleged plagiarists, maybe it can be assumed that those people didn't realize that they were copying from other people (or even doing anything wrong at all). Because the Internet seems like a free-for-all platform so much of the time, it is sometimes hard to remember that copyright and ethical issues actually exist and must be adhered to.

Calling it what it is

In reality, when people plagiarize, they are stealing. They are stealing the words of others. Many times, those words were hard to come by originally. They are also stealing the website traffic that occurs as a result of the articles themselves. That traffic is the reward for having creatively expressed ideas in written form with the intended objective of being a valuable resource to other people. That information is based on the level of expertise of the subject matter expert who has genuinely written the article.

The way in which the Internet is set up makes it easy to understand how it could be a breeding ground for plagiarism. As with any important and vast vehicle for communication, along with the inspiring, brilliant and sharp individuals who want to share their knowledge, there will always be the people who want to profit without doing any of the work. If you remember the children's story "The Little Red Hen," the concept is identical. In the story, the little red hen found a piece of wheat and asked for help with turning it into flour and eventually into bread. She got no volunteers among the farm animals for the work. When she asked who would help her to eat the bread, all of the animals volunteered. They all wanted to reap the benefits without doing any of the work.

What to do when you find out that your work has been plagiarized

You have an obligation to yourself and to your business to take some kind of action if you find out that your work has been plagiarized. Sometimes you will want to confront the plagiarizer through a private Email message, sometimes you will want to confront the plagiarizer in a more public manner online and sometimes (if you actually happen to know the person) you will want to take a more direct route, such as a phone call or a face-to-face meeting. Whichever method you choose, you are giving the plagiarizer a clear message that you are aware of what he or she is doing and that they better stop doing it immediately. Many times, merely drawing their attention to the fact that you know will be enough to make them stop.

Conclusion

We all understand clearly what plagiarism is and why it is wrong to plagiarize. Of course, this should not stop you from feeling free about continuing to post your articles for the benefit of others. If you want to share what other people have written, remember to give the proper credit and a back link to those people who have worked so hard to come up with the article in the first place.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

About this Author

Carolyn T. Cohn is the Chief Editor of CompuKol Communications. Mrs. Cohn has a wealth of experience in managing people and projects. She has run several editorial departments for various companies. Mrs. Cohn has 25 years of editorial experience and her expertise covers a wide range of media, such as online editing, editing books, journal articles, abstracts, and promotional and educational materials. Throughout her career, Mrs. Cohn has established and maintained strong relationships with professionals from a wide range of companies. The principle that governs her work is that all words need to be edited.

Mrs. Cohn earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo.

Mrs. Cohn is a member of the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA).

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