Copyrighted Material and Plagiarism

    In chapter 3, it has been explained how you can manipulate your content to be more relevant, more useful to your visitor, and at the same time, more keyword rich for better search engine optimization. However, for some sites who really aim to rank as high as they possibly can on Yahoo or Google, they tend to copy or lift content from sites that have satisfactory page ranks.

    In the internet, and in any medium of publication, broadcasting, and the arts, materials created become the exclusive property of the writer or artists by means of the copyright. If anyone wishes to use such materials for posting on a site, whether it is a photo, a paragraph, a graphic, a chart, and the like, permission must be obtained from the creator.

    Such is a huge problem that befalls the SEO community as well as the academic community. Because searching on the World Wide Web is so easy, anybody can readily find some good material and pass it off as their own.

    If you are a web master, looking for content for your site, you can check out sources that provide free use of graphics like banners, fonts, pictures, and others.

    For material such as text, since you can’t directly lift from other sources, you can opt to purchase articles written in directories. In this way, the writer sells you his work, and you now have the copyright to it.

    If you really must use the words of others to stress important points in your site content, the best solution is to cite references. In this manner, you give due acknowledgement to the author, artist, or creator of the material.

    There are many methods of citing references or sources on your web page. In academic papers, the APA, MLA, and Harvard methods are widely used. You can find some scientific sites that use these formats to cite sources of statistics, interviews, books, and journal publications.

    Also, there are companies that hire freelance writers to provide the content for them. In fact, a huge number of sites online, even those with writer’s names on them, have content that was written by someone else. Freelance writers may also be termed as ghost writers, since their names will not be acknowledged once the material appears on the site.

    This saves web masters and SEO companies a lot of time, since they no longer have to think about composing paragraphs and pages for their content. A lot of times, the keyword and other specs of the articles and blogs are given.

    The writer simply has to follow the instructions, including the keywords being integrated as appropriately within the text. There are sites that highly promote the prevention of plagiarism, which is why content submitted can be readily checked for originality or not.

    Copy Scape is one good example of a site used to detect plagiarism. It is a paid service, often with web masters, writers, and professors as their clients. Files that need to be checked are uploaded to Copy Scape, and a report is generated to determine how much of the text was original or not.

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