the past few years, a bad phenomenon has spread in the content published online, as some people create sites that essentially steal and copy original content from other sites or recycle (rework) the content of other people’s sites and then publish it on their sites.
This phenomenon has negatively affected all types of content published online, causing poor quality of the content produced in general, in addition to search engines penalizing a large number of these sites from time to time for copying and reformulating content from original sources that own the ownership rights to the original content. .
In this article, we will highlight some facts based on which we recommend that you do not create a website based on copying or paraphrasing from other sources, even if it is profitable for you in the short term.
We will not discuss the ways and methods of writing content that attracts the visitor, as we have published an entire article about tips for writing an article that adds value to visitors to your site.
Search Engine Intelligence: Where has it reached?
First, let us start with an example that shows you the intelligence and development reached by search engines and spiders that arrange search results among millions of different sites that provide content in various fields.
When you enter a search engine (Google, for example) and search for a specific topic, let it be (calorie calculator) , you will notice that some unofficial sites appear in the first results, while sites for official and governmental institutions appear in the links and late results of the search. Why did Google give priority to those sites over Even though it’s unofficial?
In short, these two sites have a calorie calculator programmed and ready to calculate calories depending on the information that is entered. Therefore, when the visitor enters the site, he finds in front of him a programmed calculator that directly calculates the calories for his body, and thus the visitor has obtained what he is looking for.
Suppose in the previous example that someone wrote an article containing 5,000 words containing complete information about calories, the benefit of calculating them, and the importance of that on human health, etc., all without the article or site actually containing a calorie calculator. Will the visitor achieve his goal when reading it? This article?
Of course not, because he wants a real calculator that calculates calories for him and he does not want information about the calories themselves.
Another example is when users search for the word Apple on the Google search engine , the first search result that appears in front of them is the official website of the well-known Apple company, and not sites that talk about apples, even though the literal meaning of the word is (apple) .
The same applies when someone searches for the word Amazon , the official website of the famous Amazon store is what appears in front of him, not sites that talk about the Amazon River, for example.
The previous examples illustrate the extent of intelligence and development that search engines have reached, as they have become able to accurately predict the searcher’s intent from the search words that he types into the search engine, and thus filter the best results that provide him with the highest possible benefit.
Therefore, we can say that the era of working with great effort and content intensity is over, and now is the era of working smart in the first place.
Despite the development and progress that search engines have achieved today, some website owners still follow the strategy of obtaining the largest possible amount of content by any means, even if it costs them to copy content from other sites and sources and publish it on their sites.
We have even begun to see entire websites being completely copied and published under a completely different domain name, which threatens the content ownership rights of many website owners, and at the same time threatens the quality of the content that the visitor is searching for and thus a complete loss of trust in your site.
warnings about recycling other sites
After this detailed review, you must have understood that search engines now understand the searcher’s intention and the real information he wants to access, and most importantly, the more intelligent visitor who can distinguish between the bad and the valuable in the content he is looking at.
In the following paragraphs are some facts and information that will help you avoid creating a site in the form of “content farms” that rely on publishing the largest amount of copied and reformulated content in an attempt to deceive search engines. However, if the matter succeeds in the short term, it is threatened with collapse and perhaps legal problems in the long term. .
1- Poor quality of content published online
One of the serious consequences of sites based on copying and paraphrasing is that they help spread bad content, which causes a weakening of the scientific value that visitors obtain from the content of those sites, which is an unethical matter that causes visitors to waste a lot of time while reading content that may be copied. Copied incorrectly and does not add any real benefit to the visitor.
In addition, poor quality content undermines the confidence of users and visitors in your entire site. If the content is fragmented and does not contain real scientific benefit, there is a high probability that the visitor will not return to the site again and will not click on it again, even if it appears in front of him in the search results in the future.
As we mentioned previously, sites that copy and reformulate content are threatened with collapse or closure at any time, whether by the penalty that the hosting company may apply to them or by penalties from the search engines that discover the matter and punish the site forcefully.
Therefore, your keenness to add exclusive, distinctive and non-copied content ensures that you build a strong relationship and trust with website visitors as well as search engines, which will bring you long-term success and not just temporary success for a few months.
2- The hosting company blocks or deletes the entire site
One of the risks faced by website owners based on copying and paraphrasing the content of other sites is the penalty that hosting companies may impose on their sites, which may amount to deleting the entire site from the company’s servers .
In the previous paragraphs, we explained that stolen content can be easily discovered by the owners of the original sites. They can use some tools, such as the Who is hosting tool , to easily find out the hosting company that hosts the site that is pirating the content of their sites.
The image shows the hosting company discovery test for a website, where the name of the hosting company and some important data about the server hosting it appear.
Based on this data, the owners of the stolen sites can write to the hosting company for the stolen site, which in turn receives the request, reviews it, and prosecutes the thief legally. The matter may even lead to blocking or deleting the company hosting the site from the company’s servers completely if it is proven that there has been a significant violation of property rights.
To understand how serious the matter is, you must know that there are strict laws to combat the theft of copyrights online. The most famous of these laws is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) , and this law contains dozens of provisions that combat the theft of copyrights published online.
Depending on the DMCA law to protect copyrights, the owner of the website whose content or rights have been stolen can write to the hosting company of the stolen website and request that the necessary legal action be taken against the stolen website that uses their hosting to upload the stolen content.
3- Search engines punish duplicate content
The official data center for the Google search engine indicates the need to avoid duplicate content within the same site or on more than one site under more than one domain name.
Search engines do not prefer sites that copy and paraphrase content at all. The more unique and distinctive the content of the site is, the greater the confidence of search engines in it, and thus the greater the benefit that accrues to the visitor himself from entering and reading the content.
4- Delete and remove the site’s search engines from search results
Poorly worded and formatted copied content causes major penalties from search engines on the site, which may lead to search engines blocking all or part of those sites if the content theft is repeated in a clear and explicit manner.
Most search engines provide a reporting form for sites that do not comply with their intellectual property rights policy for content published online.
In particular, Google provides a model for receiving reports of sites that do not respect the content publishing policy and property rights. Indeed, Google deletes many sites from its search results if those sites are proven to violate the privacy policy of other sites and steal the rights to their content.
The stolen content reporting form provides the ability to contact the Google team with sites that violate policies, and from experience I can tell you that this matter may seriously cause a site to be deleted from search results if it turns out that there is a clear violation within the site’s content:
5- Ease of discovering content copied by website owners
One of the important reasons that should keep you away from creating a website that relies on copying and paraphrasing from other sources is the proliferation of tools and programs that detect copied content very easily and without any effort at all.
This means that owners of original sites are able to detect stolen sites easily, and thus the site becomes threatened with closure according to the legal measures that owners of original content can take. One of the most popular tools for detecting stolen content is the Plagiarism tool .
You can access this tool and copy the content that you suspect is stolen and paste it into the tool, which will begin an extensive search across the Internet in all published articles, and tell you if there is a similarity with other content or not, and if there is a similarity, the tool will provide you with the percentage of similarity and stolen content as a percentage. percentage.
The previous image shows a content theft detection test. We have added content copied from a previously published online article. The report tells us that the content is 100% copied. In this case, the owner of the original content can obtain the link to the website for this stolen content, and thus can Report the site owner if content, images, or any other copyrighted items are stolen from the site.
There is also another more professional tool, which is Copyscape , which once you log in and create an account with it, you can put a link to any website, and immediately after that, the tool performs a complete online scan to access all the websites published online that contain content that is copied or similar to the site that you have created. Paste its link.
There is a long list of tools for detecting stolen content, and there is no space to mention them all, but what you should know is that stealing content is not a good bet at all, as it has become easier to detect stolen content.
Conclusion
From the above, we can reach the bottom line, which is that the idea of creating a site based on content copied from another site will be a very bad idea, and its consequences will be negative, as your hosting company will soon discover that the content has been stolen and cancel your subscription, and thus your effort in building the site will have been wasted. In vain.
Try to launch your own website with your own style and distinctive content in order to be able to compete. The explanation for the success of popular professional websites nowadays is excellence in their content. Stay away from copied content, as it is a bad investment of your time and money.
