Plagiarism and Online Writing

Plagiarism is something that all of us online writers have to deal with, and it is very unfortunate. Some of these instances people may not understand what they are doing, and others is just plain stealing our content. When we have articles plagiarized we lose views, and when we lose views we lose money.

What is OK for others to do:

We like the sites that copy our introduction, then link back to our articles. This helps us build backlinks. Backlins help increase our level on search engines, and get more people to view our articles. Any links to our article is a good thing, unless they share the entire article.

What is not OK for others to do:

Plagiarism is not OK at all. This is when someone copies our articles or blog posts without our consent. Even if they make adjustments to the article, it is still your article. I had one person take one of my articles and used words with different meaning throughout, it was still stealing. I had it removed.

What you can do to have these articles removed:

• Leave comments if they are allowed. Comment on there article or blog post, and provide a link back to the original article. Ask them to remove it immediately.
• Contact the site and let them know about the incident.
  
• Flag the content if you can. Explain why if you are asked.
• Report the site to Google if they are using Google adsense.
  
• Let the site you are writing for know about the situation. If the individual has stolen your content, they have probably stolen others from the same site.

Plagiarism hurts all online writers. It reduces our search engine rankings, it reduces our views, and it makes us lose money. We will never completely stop individuals from stealing our content, but we may slow them down if all of us watch for these issues.

I have personally went through a couple of sites and let the people that originally wrote the content know about the article. It took a little time out of my day, but it was helpful to the writing community.

If you are knew to writing:

It is great for new individuals to begin writing online, but they need to have basic knowledge. To begin with, never plagiarize other peoples work. It is wrong. If you want to use ideas from others, touch on the subject in a completely different manner. If you learn to respect other writers, you will begin to get respect.