Creating Content by Using Good Research Practices

Plagiarism is when a person uses the language and thoughts of another author and then represents them as their own original material. Theft is taking and removing the personal property of another with the intent to deprive the owner. When a person copies off of another website, which is not owned by them and for which they haven’t been given permission to copy from, it is both plagiarism and theft.

Basically, don’t take other people’s hard work and use it for your own content. It’s considered an unethical business practice and secondly, you’ll probably get your hand slapped by Googlebot for duplicate content. It is the quickest way to lose your site’s page rank, lose your placement in Google Index and even worse, get banned from Google altogether. Therefore, when you’re researching your topics and pulling from published websites, scrape it clean and make it your own. Take the information you have gathered and then give it your own voice, your own flair and definitely put it into your words.

Whatever topic you are researching, chances are good that others are also writing about it on the Web. And if you know how and where to search in Google, you’ll be able to find that information with ease. Since I happen to write on diverse topics and I’m definitely not a walking encyclopedia like Charlie Babbit, I spend a fair amount of my time in research mode. I would like to share a few tips and short cuts that can make your research time more productive.

I have found the following items to be helpful:

• Using quotation marks for specific phrases
• Using Google Blog Search
• Using Copyscape to check for duplicate content
• Using Wikipedia with caution

Quotation Marks

It is true when your topic has over a million searches showing up in Google Index. It would take forever to weed through this many searches to find exactly what you are looking for. As an example, let’s say that you’re writing an article on spiders. There are over 27,700,000 searches on the word “spiders” for you to gather your information and facts from. You will need to narrow down your search a bit. Are you writing about a particular spider? If so, you will want to put quotes around it, such as “tree spiders,” “widow spiders,” “jumping spiders,” “tarantulas,” etc. If you are writing about all spiders and are focusing more on specific characteristics, search those phrases using quotation marks. Google will pull up all sites that contain your exact phrase.

For Example:

• “where spiders live” – 616 searches
• “What spiders eat” – 254 searches
• ” spider reproduction ” – 1,150 searches
• “poisonous spiders” – 19,200 searches

If you’re writing about a particular spider type along with it’s characteristics, simply add the type within the quotes.

Such as:

• “Where tarantulas live” – 57 searches
• “What tarantulas eat” – 9 searches
• “tarantula reproduction” – 96 searches
• “poisonous tarantulas” – 468 searches

By narrowing down your search ahead of time, your research becomes more specific to your intended topic.

Google Blog Search

When I’m researching a particular topic, I always check to see what other people have to say about it. You will find well written posts and others that may not be so great in Google Blog Search. However, they can all be useful to spark ideas and help to get your “creative juices” flowing. For instance, another writer may have taken your topic in an interesting direction, one that you may not have thought of otherwise. Look at other people’s blog posts as inspiration, but don’t copy their work. Instead, extract some of their “key phrases,” type them into Google and then expand on it with your own ideas. You want to to make your content “better” than what’s already out there.

Copyscaping Your Content

Copyscape is an indispensable free content writing tool that can help you with your research and content writing. You simply type in your the URL of our content into Copyscape (you must first publish it) and copyscape will pull up any page that is a match to yours. You may find a sentence, a phrase or even a paragraph that will need to be rewritten in YOUR own words. Be sure that the content on your site isn’t merely copied off of other sites because Copyscape will expose it.

The best way to avoid this from happening is simply never copy and paste word for word in in your text document . What I do is pull down specific phrases and information and then lay it out more like an outline, rather than in complete sentences. Copyscape can also be used as a watch dog to make sure other websites are not plagiarizing your content. There actually exists “scraping” software that can take content from one website and put it onto another. It’s a good idea to occasionally check your content against Copyscape to see if anyone is stealing your content.

If you do find that someone has your content on their site and without your permission, you can report it to Google. I usually email the webmaster of the plagiarizing site and demand to have my content removed along with a few threats. If that doesn’t work, i contact the hosting company that’s hosting the site. You can find that information at network-tools.com.

Wikipedia with Caution

Use Wikipedia with caution. Many people use it because it’s a quick reference source that covers a lot of topics. Keep in mind however, Wikipedia is a user generated content site and is chalked full of misinformation and inaccuracies as well as biased viewpoints. Most of the problems are innocent human error, but there are some contributors that definitely have their own agenda. Therefore, if you choose to use Wikipedia as an information source, double check your facts from other reliable sources to make sure that what you are writing is actually correct. Nothing kills the credibility of a website quicker than felonious information. For the success of your website, use good content research practices and make sure what you write is your own.