A Writer I Hired Wrote Similarly Content With Another Site. Will It Hurt My Website SEO?

Anna
Hi, I hired a freelancer to write content for my blog, and recently I found out that he copied the content from another site. It is not exact copypaste, but he uses the same article format and even reviewed the same products. So the content is very similar to the sites from where he copied. I want to ask how bad is this for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Should I remove this content immediately? It is the first time I have had this issue. Don't wanna even say that I paid for this content, so I feel even more disappointed and sad…

📰👈

a writer i hired wrote similarly content with another site will it hurt my website SEO

🔗🏹

6 👍🏽4 😢10 17 💬🗨

Toto
If you're not satisfied then it's probably not going to work for you. Generally, spun content isn't going to do you any good. If it's blatantly manipulative it can harm you. Garbage content isn't going to do any good for your reputation, possibly even harm it as well.
Naveed
Yes remove this. This can effect the website overall and kindly report such writers they effect are businesses badly. If the content is not indexed then don't worry much if it is indexed then try to edit it with awesome content and don't delete it and also upload some good content and create interlinks with them. It will help
Rienzi
Why do you think copying format and reviewing the same product is gonna do you bad SEO wise?
🤭👍🏽2

Anna ✍️ » Rienzi
I actually don't know … I am aware that duplicate content is bad which means copypaste from another site, what he did… He took another article rewrite this ( there are still some phrases that are similar but he rewrote like 80 % or more ) but kept same structure of the article he copied ( so the same products, similar titles, pros and cons etc) . So I am worry this is not good, first because he copied someone's else content which I believe it's been illegal and it might causes the harm for my site as well?
Rienzi
First of all, they should be rid of if they are doing a crappy job vs what you are paying them.
But as far as duplicate content – no it's not an SEO issue. in fact if the rewrite is better the page can perform good.
No it's not illegal unless they have patent and you literally copied 100%. It's not copying when you've rewritten 80%.
The issue is quality of work. If you pay good money for crappy work then you deserve better.
🤭👍🏽2

Adam J. Humphreys 👑
It entirely depends on the ratio of copied content vs original. If they copied from various resources and reworded it that would be likely more successful. It's a ratio and not a simple yes no situation without seeing it on copyscape.com. If you hired them to write content and it's not original though that's plagiarism.
COPYSCAPE.COM
Copyscape Plagiarism Checker – Duplicate Content Detection Software
Maher
There can be many possible scenarios. It could be spun content or AI rewritten content (many agencies, writers are using AI software now a days), on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) side If its not a spun content and CopyScape shows no copy content then there should be absolutely no issue at all (also check that content for cyrillic content fraud) – on the positive side you might get benefit from SEO perspective due to TF-IDF model, in simple words: you would be having words and covering topics that a top site is already covering and so you will establish relevancy with the said topic. There can be another possibility that writer has used AI or other similar programs to re-write content. There's no duplicate content penalty unless and until you are mass-producing duplicate/spam content – in case of 1 or few duplicate articles there's no penalty but there's no value in your content either so Google will only show 1 authoritative source instead of showing multiple duplicate content pages/sources in results. Same article format (headings) and same products shouldn't be any issue at all though writer should have taken considerations from top 3 sites provided that content is genuine, not spun or AI re-written it should be all good! (P.S many sites are ranking on easy/medium level competition topics with AI content/AI-re-written content for now, its too early to say what Google reaction would be on AI content sites)
Bevington
Google has a duplicate content filter. Copying someone else's text is a very bad idea. Google it.

Ammon Johns 👑 » Bevington
the filtering is applied at the SERP level, and is SERP-page specific, i.e. a duplicate entry on a different SERP page to the first isn't filtered. Filtering has no effect on scoring the page, only in choosing what to display to the end user.

There is no 'penalty' (i.e. thing that has an effect on your metrics or scores) for duplicate content.
However, you are absolutely right that it is something to avoid, because that's another page Google had to index from your site that gave no additional rankings at all. Very few (relatively) websites are 100% indexed in Google, and even those that are rarely have every page refreshed even as often as once every 3 months. Googlebot could have been indexing a unique page instead on that visit, and instead it ended up effectively getting the same content twice.
The real cost of duplicate content is nothing to do with Google itself, but the fact you are splitting the links between 2 versions of the same content, adding overhead to your crawling needs without adding anything that raises your crawl priority (in SEO slang, wasting crawl budget), etc.
That's why Google never, ever had or needed a 'Duplicate Content Penalty' – it was never needed, because having duplicate content almost always devalues itself. There has never been an actual advantage to any site in having duplicate content, but syndication of content is quite common in the news/media.

Buth
It can be bad for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or can not bad for SEO. Some people use this tactic to outrank competitors and it works. Few month ago some guys copied our website and it affected our SEO performance. Our SEO solved that problem via DMCA reports.
Well, nobody knows how Google will assess these pages but I think it is bad idea in the long run. These posts aren't unique, they don't create your query space and your brand space in the web.
I think it'd be better to write new articles and replace freelancer's articles.
🤯1

📰👈