[Quick Tips] Does Google See Your Web Marketing Content as Unique?

A piece of SEO strategy that is often overlooked is the quality of the web marketing content itself, not just how many keywords are used and how often. Many small business owners are so worried about getting a website to begin with, that they don’t put a lot of thought into what to say.

Search engines, like Google and Bing, seem to give higher rankings to sites that provide new information on a topic. That doesn’t mean you need to reinvent your whole industry! It just means that Google looks for new content and isn’t a fan of plagiarism. It will penalize your site if it suspects you are guilty of it. (Plus you’ll get the headache of all the legal problems involved.) You might be thinking, “I’m fine. I didn’t copy my text from anywhere.” That’s a good start, but there are only so many ways to recommend people get regular maintenance on their air conditioners. It is highly likely that you have some web marketing content that is very similar to someone else’s without you even realizing it. Plagiarism doesn’t have to be intentional, and it doesn’t have to be exactly the same word for word. If your text has a few words or phrases in common with another site, it still might get flagged for plagiarism.

Obviously, you can’t spend day after day searching the whole web for text that looks like yours, but you don’t have to. One tool that I really like for plagiarism searches is Copyscape. Through Copyscape’s premium search feature, you can check anything from a small piece of text to a whole website at a time. It will show you pieces of text that may be plagiarized, as well as provide samples from the corresponding text on the other site(s) and the URL(s) where you can find the similar text. You could also use this tool to see if someone is plagiarizing your web content. (Of course, proving who really owns it could be difficult.) While Copyscape’s premium searches aren’t free, they are pretty close, with most searches costing only 5 cents each. It is also really easy to use. With this tool, you can quickly eliminate any worries about plagiarism in your web marketing and focus on ways to get more leads.