It's an undeniable truth that online trust takes years to build. But at the same time, it's also a fact that just one careless move can ruin it. Unfortunately, this damage can last much longer than you expect. While many other factors may contribute to lowering your online reputation, plagiarism also influences it negatively. In severe cases, it can even tear the whole image down.

But it doesn't happen eventually; instead, the effects show up gradually. However, the question is, how exactly does plagiarism affect your digital character, and what can help you fix it before it creates a problem for your online reputation? If you are looking for the answer to this question, make sure you read this guide till the end. By the end, we hope that everything will be clear to you.

Impacts Of Plagiarism On Your Online Reputation

Plagiarism is like a silent killer for your online reputation. It can gradually and sometimes quickly destroy the credibility of your digital presence. 

Let's look at what exactly happens when plagiarism shows up in your content consistently. 

Negative Search Engine Perception

Your online authority is not all about your respect in the eyes of people. Instead, the way search engines perceive your value also contributes to building your stronger presence. However, when your content contains plagiarism, it negatively impacts how Google and other similar search engines view your site. 

They might drop your pages in ranking or remove them completely. Over time, this lowers your domain trust and may reduce the frequency of your pages being indexed. And unfortunately, all this happens because they start considering your site less credible due to the existence of copied, stolen, or even unintentionally matching text. 

Damage To Audience's Trust

Trust is the heart of your online presence, and at the same time, it's the most precious thing that you lose due to plagiarism. Once your readers start noticing that you have written the same thing as others, they begin questioning your originality. 

Even a small copy-paste can make them feel like you don't care about offering value to them. When your content frequently includes sections resembling someone else's, people might consider you as intellectual theft. Consequently, it's less likely that they will come back to you whenever they need valuable information. 

Decreased Competitive Authority

Establishing a strong online presence among competitors requires a significant amount of time and effort. To achieve this, you must consistently deliver high-quality content and cover topics in depth to demonstrate your authority. But let's face the fact: even a single yet severe incident of plagiarism can ruin your hard-earned competitive reputation. Wondering how? 

Once they realize that you are no longer making an effort to provide real value, they won't invite you to speak, partner, or be featured. As a result, your brand mentions will stop increasing and building your name again will be difficult. This means no regular growth in online reputation, leading to your business suffering. 

Key Practices To Fix Plagiarism Before It Hurts Reputation

Now that you know how plagiarism can damage your online reputation, it's necessary that you learn how to fix it in a timely manner. Well, first of all, do research before writing and commit to writing everything on your own. Once you finish writing, here is what to do to fix plagiarized parts, if any.

Test Originality Before Publishing

Many web creators upload their content before an instant originality test. So, if there is any plagiarized section in that text by chance, it also gets published unintentionally. Therefore, never post content until you are 100% sure that it's completely free from plagiarism. For a robust and quick confirmation, run an originality test using a reliable plagiarism checker free. 

A plagiarism detector automatically scans the whole text and compares it with a vast database for accurate detection. Once identified, you can fix plagiarized parts easily. This not only saves your time, effort, and budget on maintaining content uniqueness but also reduces the chances of reputation damage. 

Ensure You Have Cite Sources

Sometimes, you intentionally borrow a few facts, figures, or stats from credible sources and forget to credit the original author. This minor oversight leads to creating verbatim plagiarism, which is the most severe type of plagiarism. That's why, once you finish writing, revisit your content carefully and check if you have cited all the sources or not. 

In case you find missing author attributes, link to the main sources or mention the names of the authors. Most importantly, make sure that you credit the right author for a particular borrowed text. If you mix attributions, like interchanging the sources of two facts, this will lead to incorrect citations. As a result, your content will still contain plagiarized parts. So, be careful while citing sources. 

Fix Plagiarism Through Rewriting

Another helpful practice to solve plagiarism issues is to do effective rewriting. This is especially useful when some of your parts accidentally match someone else's. In such a case, restructure the respective sentences and introduce new vocabulary to that part. However, if your changes remove plagiarism but add to complexity, rewrite the text again with simplicity in mind. 

You can also rewrite text online with the help of an AI rewording tool. The benefit of automated assistance is that you get more versions of text in less time. This enables you to make one that is not only unique but also easily readable and clear. So you don't have to spend much time brainstorming to come up with the right words or sentence structure. 

To Sum Up

In a nutshell, plagiarism ruins your online reputation by lowering your image in front of your readers, competitors, and search engines. It makes all of them think that you steal work from others and don't make an effort to create original work. This results in weaker audience interaction, reduced rankings, and lost chances of partnerships or brand mentions. But you can avoid all these consequences by running a plagiarism test on time, citing sources, and removing plagiarized parts through effective rewriting.