Tips On How to Recognize and Avoid Content Duplication

Duplicate content is considered a bad thing in the SEO and academic world. Therefore, you must avoid duplication when creating written content for a website or educational purposes. Duplication or plagiarism can ruin the website’s user experience, search engine ranking, reputation, and writers’ worth.

It can also lead you to serious legal consequences. That’s why you should put some extra effort and try to generate content yourself and avoid any kind of duplication.

If plagiarism is a problem for you. Read this article till the end. It will answer three basic questions regarding duplication and plagiarism.

1. How to find plagiarism in your content?
2. How to avoid it while writing?
3. How to remove duplication and make content 100% unique?

Before digging for the answer to these questions, let’s learn what duplication or plagiarism is.

What is Meant by Content Duplication?

Duplicate content is that type of content that is published on multiple websites without any change. Usually, this happens when writers intentionally copy others’ content and send it to their clients, post it on their personal websites, or submit it to an educational institute.

It is not always a bad thing as sometimes duplication is essential, especially when a writer will have to define a phenomenon or quote other well-known others’.

However, in these cases, it is the duty of the writer to give credit to the real author.

There is another exception when the duplication occurs unintentionally. For example, writers don’t modify common phrases or truths. A common phrase like “honesty is the best policy” could have been written on millions of web pages. Now it doesn’t mean that no one can use this phrase. But this exception is only for a specific limit. After that, there is no margin for plagiarism.

Coming to the actual topic. Let’s begin with finding plagiarism!

How to Find Plagiarism in Your Content?

First of all, you need to know if your content is unique and doesn’t have any plagiarism. Checking plagiarism before submitting or publishing your content is essential as it can help you know whether the content was unique or not.

You can use online plagiarism tools to check plagiarism in your content. You need to upload or paste your content into them, and they will compare it with already published content. Once the process is complete you will get the results on your screen.

However, to accurately learn what is the percentage of plagiarism in your content, or which parts of your text are plagiarised you must find a good plagiarism checker. There are dozens of online plagiarism tools, but not every tool is equally good in checking plagiarism. That’s why you should only prefer a plagiarism checker that can offer everything you need.

Furthermore, some plagiarism detectors only show the percentage of plagiarism in the content, which is useless if you want to remove it. Some are very costly, and not everyone can afford them.

So, the question is how to find a plagiarism checker that everyone can afford and rely on. Here are some tips for finding the best plagiarism detector according to your needs;

• Get recommendations from industry experts or your seniors
• Select a plagiarism checker that is free to use
• Prefer a tool whose results are always accurate
• Choose the tools that use AI to locate plagiarism
• Only rely on the plagiarism checker that guarantees data security

Tips to Avoid Plagiarism

You need to avoid plagiarism in your content. Here are discussed tips that can help you avoid plagiarism.

Use Your Creativity

When you don’t trust your creativity or don’t want to write a piece of article, leave it for some other time. If you don’t, it will encourage you to copy and paste the already published content. To avoid duplication, developing your ideas and knowledge is essential rather than relying on others’ work. Your creativity will not only help you generate unique content but will enhance your writing skills as well.

Acquire Knowledge, Not Words

When you read some sources to enhance your knowledge on a topic, you unintentionally copy the words and phrases that the author has used. This practice can increase the plagiarism percentage in your content. Therefore, you should only get the knowledge required to write your content but not copy the other authors’ tone, words, phrases, or style.

Use Multiple Sources of Information

Relying on one source is also a significant cause of plagiarism. Usually, the writers don’t use multiple sources and depend on the information that is provided in that specific article, which is sometimes not enough to cover the topic, or they also don’t understand the language. So, they can intentionally or unintentionally copy their words or phrases, which can be called duplication.

Develop Your Style

Developing your own writing style can help you avoid accidental plagiarism. Even if you copy any content and write it in your words, there are fewer chances of plagiarism. That’s why writers with their own writing styles don’t worry about plagiarism, and their content always gets approved by everyone.

Tips to Remove Plagiarism

If plagiarism is detected in your content, you need to remove it and make it unique before using it.

Try Paraphrasing

If a few sentences of your text are plagiarized, it is easy to get rid of it. However, if many of your paragraphs are plagiarized, you need to get help from the paraphrasing method.

For that purpose, you can use an online paraphraser, or you can also do it manually. But the use of an online paraphrasing tool is better when a lot of changes are required in less time. A rephrasing tool rewrites content by replacing the words with their synonyms and provides a unique version of the content.

Give Credit to Authors

This technique is very beneficial in academic writing, where you are bound to give references. When they have to write the exact definitions without changing words, they can use quotation marks and give credit to the real author or philosopher. This practice can make your work legitimate.

Final Words

In almost every form of writing, plagiarism is considered unethical and illegal, which can have consequences. For example, if you publish duplicate content on your website, search engines may not rank your content or web pages.

At worst, they can flag your website, which won’t be shown on the search engines. Similarly, in academic writing, plagiarism can waste all of your efforts, and the students can fail to achieve passing marks. That’s why the writers have to find duplication in their content and remove it.