Effective Writing

Originality is integral to good content creation. There are penalties for content that repeats other content, and numerous copyright laws. The easiest way to avoid this is ensure your content is original.

If you do use someone else’s work, even if you have their permission, you may still get penalized because of a duplicate content penalty. A duplicate content penalty is given to websites that Google thinks have copied original content from another source.

Unfortunately, duplicate content penalties don’t distinguish between the original content and the copied content, so be careful about letting other people use your content without changing it at least twenty percent. Google could give you the penalty even though you’re the original producer. This has to do with PageRank, and is too complicated to get into here.

Many believe that the search engines are changing this policy so that the original source is considered the site that published the content first, regardless of anything else. but until this becomes fact, don’t allow anybody to publish your content until after it has been available on your website for at least 2-3 weeks or until it has been spidered and indexed by the search engines.

There are many people who steal content and use it word for word; there’s not much you can do to avoid this, but you can track it with certain tools and take the proper action if you find someone is stealing your content. Also, put a copyright tagline at the bottom of anything you create; it can be an effective deterrent for prospective copyright violators.