Plagiarism is looked at as one of the most serious ‘cyber-crimes’ an individual can make. If you are the
person that has had their content copied, then it can sometimes be the most frustrating and angry moments of your online career that someone had the audacity to copy your high quality content in an attempt to make their content look more high quality. As well as this, the feeling of having a freelancer that you have hired copy content from a website to their own article, for which you are paying them for, is a horrible feeling to have too – anger and a strong sense of worry as to what this all means for your website and it’s search engine optimisation. With this, here is what you should do in the case of plagiarism, be it as the person that is being plagiarised or if a freelancer has published plagiarised work to your website.
If You Have Been Plagarised
If you have been the one who has had their content copied, you will need to take the following steps:
- Is your content copyright protected? This is usually denoted by a (C) sign at the bottom of a webpage. If it is not, then anyone can copy your content. If it is copyright protected…
- Inform the website owner who has copied the content. This can usually be done by a contact form, for which the vast majority of websites have. If it does not have a contact form, then you will need to find other ways to contact the owner, such as commenting at the bottom of articles or social media platforms.
- Discuss/negotiate the damages and future actions. Copying of content can benefit others, which is wrong. You need to decide how much they benefited, if at all, and recoup this as you deserve it. As well as this, you need to compose some future actions to the web owner, such as to remove the content or, at the very least, reference the content he or she has copied.
If a Freelancer Plagiarised Content On Your Website
When we hire freelancers on the internet, there is always a level of risk in hiring someone that you do not and, at first, cannot trust. However, we all hope that plagiarismis never going to happen in the freelance world. But, unfortunately, it does and here are some steps you can take to minimise the damage plagiarismcould cause to your site.
- Fire the freelancer – if he or she is prepared to do this, then who knows what else they have plagiarised. For the benefit of your website, it is best for them to stop working. With plagiarism, you get one strike and you’re out.
- Delete the content. This is a must. To prevent any SEO damage, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible – treat it like a virus.
- Check your other articles the freelancer done for plagiarism – just to be sure, otherwise you could have other ‘viruses’ eating into your SEO.
