Question about content writing: duplicate content

[Gentlewoman]

Hi everyone,
I'm new here and new to digital marketing as well so I appreciate any help I can get.
I've been doing content writing for a few months now and I was wondering if there's a way to determine if you unconsciously duplicated someone's work or someone copied yours? And how do you find out if you posted the content first or they did?
Thanks!

 

[Ryuzaki]

The most expedited and easiest way for is to use http://www.copyscape.com (The Premium Edition) which costs a few pennies per search.

There are other pieces of software that do it "for free" but cost a higher monthly fee, and most may just be hooking into the CopyScape API anyways.

 

[stackcash]

Copyscape is great. You can also search for snippets of the text on Google to see if it is indexed on another site.

 

[CCarter]

unconsciously duplicated someone's work

Well that really wouldn't matter if you are redoing it in your own words. People have tons of ideas that others have already done topics on. A new angle or fresh idea from the collection of mental content you've aggregated doesn't really seem like it'll cause any problems.

A lot of people don't know this, but it's extremely rare for a sentence to be written twice the exact same way, even with billions of people online. A simple google search on any sentence in a paragraph will showcase where the original content came from, for example Googling the first sentence of this paragraph results in Zero exact results: "A lot of people don't know this, but it's extremely rare for a sentence to be written twice the exact same way, even with billions of people online."

^^ use that trick in double quotes within Google to see if a sentence has already been created or duplicate. Obviously an extremely short sentence might create results, but you don't have to worry about duplicate content problems with short phrases like "I love you!" - otherwise no one would rank.

 

[Andrewkar]

Google is "looking" at content from a bit different angle than most people would think. G is recognizing style in which entire article is written (How good they are at it? I have no idea...). However, I believe algorithm can see differences in writing style between many different paragraphs in any given article. I like to think that algorithm is looking for some sort of congruency in article (and entire website's content), if they find out that something does not add up as it should, algorithm might judge that article as a lower quality content (lower than you would expect). Above is based just on my tinkering, and some small "study" (that doesn't matter anyway...).

Here is how to do content for G to make him happy https://www.google.com/design/spec/style/writing.html#

 

[Gentlewoman]

I still get confused with all the technicalities and Google requirements. Thanks everyone for all the great advice!

 

[Mugen]

I still get confused with all the technicalities and Google requirements. Thanks everyone for all the great advice!

It's great to pay attention to Google, but don't put too much weight on everything they say. They are notorious for saying one thing and doing the complete opposite.

As long as you or someone you hire is rewriting the content, you shouldn't have a problem.