I spotted a weird question that was asked of Google’s John Mueller around plagiarism. The question was, what percentage level of plagiarism does Google allow so a site can rank in Google. Is it 5%, 10%, etc? The question is weird but I guess there are some myths out there around it being okay to plagiarize content for SEO purposes?
The question was posted on Twitter and read “is there any specific percentage of plagiarism that is acceptable in content some people says 5 to 10 percent is acceptable. How much true is it. Is there any specific guidelines regarding plagiarism.”
I am not sure how John can answer that, but he said “Acceptable by whom? Why not aim for none?”
Here are those tweets:
Acceptable by whom? Why not aim for none?
— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 30, 2022
He then goes on to explain that this is accepted by the SEO industry…
If your site gets most of its traffic from SEO experts, I’d ask them.
— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 30, 2022
I am not going to make the SEO joke everyone is expecting but seriously? Where does this stuff come from.
Sure, we had someone claim they were plagiarizing their own content – which is just a misuse of words. Maybe that is the same thing here, people are not understanding the true definition of plagiarism?
Sure, you can quote people, like I am doing here in this story, and then add more context, your own opinion, your own value. But to outright plagiarize content – that is just wrong and unethical. Can you do it and rank in Google Search? Possibly… But there is no percentage that Google is going to say is okay when it comes to plagiarism or really much of anything else…
Forum discussion at Twitter.
