Problems with Plagiarism in Online Content

View of Tagaytay Highlands
Photo credit: Maryann Suller Macatlang

Writing portals are faced with plagiarism in online content many times. This morning, I rested for a little while, and decided to read several business articles on one site. I noticed two to three posters doing superb work on financial investments and stock trading. Since I do a lot of work on this niche, I decided to go over their work. They were superb! I have not seen anything like it except on the Economic Review or the Washington Post.

What I did next was to look at the profile pages and see the background of the writers. I read  their previous postings so as to know more about them. There was nothing said in their profile. I noticed that one writer has a different writing style for every post, and that made me wonder if he wrote all of the articles himself.

The other one came up with such superb work, that I knew  right away that I have read them somewhere. Voila! The plagiarism checker revealed that it was copied from the internet ---verbatim. If you are 24 years old, with no track record in finance work, and writes like the financial gurus of Wall Street ---nobody is going to believe you. It’s either you are a financial whiz, or you copied the whole darned thing from cyberspace!

Old Ifugao carving of a man counting his produce
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

These types of online submissions should have been rejected outright. I don’t think Google is going to like them over the long term. Having so many problematic contents at one portal is a dangerous thing. With the recent Google Panda update, the presence of numerous plagiarized content on a site would be detrimental --- like, having their Adsense removed.

Let us hope that writing sites install an auto –check feature that would stop problematic contents from being submitted. Plagiarism is a blatant insult to the reader and the entire writing community.

Have a good day everyone! :)

#plagiarism
#online writing

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