How to make sure your website has unique content?
You have created the dream website for your business using attractive colors and beautiful graphics.
The web designer has done an excellent job. It’s now time to fill up the website with content.
However, it’s not something to be done lightly because it’s not enough just to fill your website with content. The content has to be valuable and informative to the user.
And most importantly, it has to be unique.
This means that the content should exist only on your site and provide additional information your visitors can’t find elsewhere.
It’s not only your customers who look for unique content. Search engines also like unique content. It’s because unique content helps search engines differentiate your website from other sites with similar content.
Search engines can thus offer diverse and high-quality results to searches practically instantly. And in the process work at improving your website ranking.
That’s why your site must have unique content and why you shouldn’t copy and paste content from other sites.
Why your site needs unique content
Before you ensure your website has unique content, you must know why it’s necessary. Sometimes you may create amazing content, but someone else may scrape your content and use it on their website.
This is not good for your business and website.
It’s because a site with duplicate content risks hurting its site ranking and reputation. Someone else may use your work and publish it as theirs. And the website in the process ends up outranking yours, which is unfair and not accepted online and offline.
Google will penalize sites with duplicate content by either lowering the website ranking or entirely removing pages with copied content.
What is duplicate content?
The same content that appears on different websites is called duplicate content. Copying someone else’s content and using it on your site is copied content. Even if you create and publish your content on two sites, it is considered duplicate content.
Search engines, including Google, exclude duplicate content from their search engine queries. They find it difficult to decide which content is more similar to a query if they encounter identical content on two sites.
Free tools to use to ensure your site has unique content
Sometimes, even while crafting your unique content, there is the chance of your unintentionally creating content that’s similar to another site’s content. That’s why it’s always better to have a habit of double-checking everything you write using plagiarism checkers.
The good news is that while you have to pay for some tools, some are available at no cost.
1. Copyscape
Copyscape is a great tool that helps you identify duplicate content through its premium services’ private index functionality. It lets you check to see which of your site pages have been duplicated across the web in a matter of seconds. All you have to do is copy paste the content or URL, and Copyscape will identify any copied content.
Copyscape highlights all duplicate content and tells you what percentage of your content matches another site’s content.
While you have to pay for checking content, the prices are minimal and well worth it. Besides, it’s one of the most popularly used plagiarism checkers today.
2. Plagspotter
Plagspotter is a great tool to identify plagiarists who have stolen and used your content. You can even use it to monitor your URLs every week to identify duplicate content automatically.
3. Duplichecker
Duplichecker checks to ensure you post unique content on your site. You can perform as many as 50 searches a day as a registered user.
4. Siteliner
Siteliner lets you check the entire site once a month for duplicate content. It also looks out for broken links and identifies the pages which are most prominent on search engines.
5. Google
You can also use Google to check for unique content.
Just copy and paste the section of text you want to check into Google’s search bar. It will help you identify if there’s any plagiarized copy of your site’s content across the web.
You see only your webpage, ideally without other results if your content is unique. However, if you see other websites with your site, Google assumes the site with the highest ranking as the original source.
So if your site isn’t ranking first, then it means your website may not have unique content.
In short, plagiarism checkers are the best tools to use to ensure your website has unique content. You can then change the content accordingly, recheck it, and publish it once you know it’s unique.
It’s better to spend time and effort checking your content before uploading it than risk Google penalizing or even removing your site.
