Plagiarism-free content

A common scam you may encounter involves people creating websites and filling them up with plagiarized content in order to sell it before the plagiarism is punished.

This is obviously a big no-no. Content can definitely be inspired by other pieces of content, but blatant plagiarism can have ramifications beyond a Google penalty.

Fortunately, there are several different tools out there that you can put a piece of content into and see if there are any similar matches on the web. Copyscape is the most widely-used of these tools.

What you’ll want to do is take 3 or 4 articles from the website and paste them into Copyscape. Since the article is on the internet, you will get a 100% match for that website, so just ignore it. We’re looking to see if there are any other matches across the internet.

With these tools, they’ll inevitably pick up little snippets that are similar and count it as plagiarism — that’s ok! I really don’t care about content matches as long as it’s under 15%. Anything over 15 or 20%, you’ll want to look into, as that’s likely not accidental.

If you find a website plagiarizing content you can still buy it if you intend on changing the content immediately, but it’s usually a sign of the owner doing other sketchy things, so I would easily pass.