Plagiarism is a practice that stemmed from academia and is generally frowned upon in all arena of application, SEO being no exception.

The Web world is the biggest platform available to mankind and thus, both original and plagiarized content get circulated throughout.

In order to provide the users with the unique write-ups only, Google has devised a way of dealing with plagiarism. In many cases, optimizers copy entire posts from websites and leave their own links behind.

Though this has happened in many cases, ramifications of the same usually gets reflected in the ranking of the site.

There are legality issues over the Internet, as it is in the real world. There are certain things that the legal constraints permit, while others don’t. So, whether you’re allowed to copy posts in their entirety from one page depends on the sites concerned.

There’re some sites that give allowances for their content to be published in other sites and this they mention in their terms and conditions page.

Though Google allows extractions of content from existing pages in parts within quotes, which it brands as ethical plagiarism, in other cases, such an act can end with copyright allegations.

Thus, copying content from other sites might face a claim of ownership by the opponent site. However, link back accreditation is not feasible in all cases, especially after the Google updates, such as the many versions of Panda, and Penguin, have been put to effect.

Since then, the idea of ‘link juice’ that allowed owners to copy content from other pages and yet get a high ranking in Google took a backseat.

Google started to stress on originality, and in doing so, it started to penalize all sites detected with duplicate content. This started since Google mistakenly subject a couple of original sources to penalties, mislead by the authoritative links of the dependent sites.

Since Panda and Penguin got launched in the market, such sites are fast getting sent out of SERP. The copy sites often would not provide links back which makes it difficult for the source sites to get any recognition.

Hence, it is important to understand the difference that lurks between ethical and unethical plagiarism. While posting bulk content on the same topic, it is only normal for sites to have their contents matching in parts. But, complete word to word plagiarism is just something that search engines do not permit.

It is funny to see how sites copy content from other sources in total and without even caring to correct the linguistic errors, put them up in their platform for traffic pulling.

Consequences of such actions can have detrimental impact on the ranking of your site. So, make sure that the content you developed is 100% original and are not just poorly rewritten versions of original ones.

Use a plagiarism checker to spot the parts of your content that matches with the existing database of the Web. There are many free and paid checkers available at the disposal of the users.