How To Check That Your Articles Are Original For Free

When you’re writing articles, whether these are for syndication, or they’re to be used on your own sites, it’s really important that these are original. Copying other people’s writing is known as plagiarism. This is the same whether this is done accidentally or intentionally. It’s morally wrong to do this, as people have spent a lot of time writing articles and content themselves. If you were to copy them, you’re ripping off the original author.
Plagiarism is also likely to get you banned from article sites, which run your articles and put in your links on the condition that everything you’re writing is original. After all, you are using these sites to position yourself as an expert. If you’ve copied the materials then you aren’t actually an expert. The expert is the person who you stole the wording from.
Generally, if you write articles for yourself, you will be okay and you won’t plagiarise. This is because you are putting pen to paper (or articles to keyboard) yourself. However, there are known cases where people accidentally plagiarise. This could be because you are relying too closely on source material. It could also be because you are less confident in rephrasing things into your natural voice (this is particularly common with non-native speakers of a language).
The other way you could end up with unoriginal material if you outsourced their production. It’s so easy for someone to simply steal an article and sell it to you. This takes them far less time than writing their own original materials. That is why you need to be wary when using outsourcers, and only rely on people you trust, as you are submitting these articles as if you wrote them yourself. Any reflections on the poor quality of outsourced writing are also a reflection on you.
The good news is that you can check articles for plagiarism quite easily, and all through the power of Google. Simply take a chunk of about seven consecutive words from the article and search Google for it. Check the first few results. If they are all at all suspicious or like your source text then you have a problem you need to address. If not, choose another section of text and repeat the process. Generally, you want to make one check per hundred words in the article. So, for a 500 word article, you want to make 5 checks. This will give you a good idea if the article is original or not.
Do be careful to always check any material you’ve outsourced, or anything that you’ve written yourself but are dubious about, for originality. This will save you from many problems in the long run. It will also ensure that you only submit articles that you can be 100% proud of.