In its essence, plagiarism is a form of theft. If you are adding someone’s ideas or words to your content pretending they are your own, it can be considered as stealing intellectual property. That’s why plagiarism is absolutely unethical.

Types of plagiarism
There are different types of plagiarism, some of which are listed below.

Direct
Direct deliberate plagiarism can be defined as the word-for-word transcription of someone else’s piece of writing without providing any attribution or quotation marks.

Self Plagiarism
Self-plagiarism occurs when an individual uses parts of his/her previous works. It also applies to publishing the same content on different platforms without pointing that out.

Mosaic
Mosaic plagiarism means borrowing someone else’s phrases without quotation marks. It also occurs when one uses the same structure and meaning of another person’s content.

Accidental
If one unintentionally paraphrases someone’s content without attribution, it’s called accidental plagiarism. It’s important to note that lack of intent does not free you from responsibility for plagiarism.

Plagiarism checker to ensure original content
Even if you are not going to use someone else’s ideas, chances are you will do it unintentionally. Even though accidental plagiarism is quite rare, it still may occur. Hence, you need to take care of checking your text for uniqueness. You can do it with the help of an online plagiarism checker for college students or some SEO tools for content writers. It’s very important not to use plagiarized content in your blog, so you shouldn’t neglect this step. Below you can read the five reasons why it’s vital to publish only unique posts.

1. Moral issues
As it was mentioned above, plagiarism literally means stealing someone else’s work. If you are using the content created by another person who was fully dedicated to its creation, you can not be viewed as a trustworthy writer. Such dishonest actions are a form of lying. By pretending that a piece was written by yourself, you are misleading your readers. They may mistakenly give you the recognition that was actually deserved by another person, which is completely unfair and unethical. So if you don’t want to act in an immoral way, publish the content created by yourself only.

2. Low ranking
SEO specialists argue that plagiarized content negatively affects the search engine ranking of your website. As Google is aimed at offering valuable top-quality content and avoiding spam, it tries to prevent information overload. Google tries not to show multiple or very similar versions of the same pages, so it simply hides content copies. As you see, using plagiarized content is pointless for your website because of Google policy. What’s more, search engines may even punish website owners who publish someone else’s pieces. This means that they may lower the ranking of your website if crawlers detect duplicate content there.

3. Destroyed reputation
Copying someone’s work can damage your reputation. In fact, plagiarizing makes an individual guilty of stealing content. This means that there is no reason for readers to trust the author. Blog visitors cannot view the source containing unoriginal content as credible. Naturally, it gets impossible for them to believe someone who steals intellectual property. So if you don’t want to disrupt your image, never use works created by others. Remember that it’s extremely difficult to recover a damaged reputation and make your readers come back.

4. Losing visitors
Website visitors appreciate original content. If you post the articles that were previously published by other bloggers, you will never have a loyal audience. Just think, why people should prefer your blog if there is nothing new for them. Users always seek innovative ideas and fresh thoughts, so they return to resources that can offer what they need. Hence, you should be creative to persuade your visitors to stay on your website for some time. If they find extraordinary materials on your pages, they will keep reading your blog with great interest.

5. Ruined career
Plagiarism can harm your career. Professionals can’t completely rely on someone’s knowledge and skills. They need to use their own experience and share their own views on particular issues instead. People want to gather different opinions and then compare them. Most of them find it right to make judgments based on an analysis of a few controversial ideas. If someone reveals that you are giving someone else’s point of view pretending it’s yours, this will make you look untrustworthy in the eyes of your readers and eventually ruin your writing career.

Final thoughts
There are various negative consequences of using plagiarized content, some of which are mentioned above. Therefore, you should always check your content for uniqueness in order to avoid undesired outcomes.

Author’s BIO
Robert Everett is a content writer and academic tutor. Robert writes articles mainly for educational platforms and study blogs. He believes that content must be not only engaging but also 100% original to bring value to the readers.