Naijafinder and Plagiarism

I noticed a new site in town and one of the things that I first wanted to know was who owned the website.

So I ran a who.is search for the domain name but it didn't give much results as to a Nigerian owner. It was registered by Namecheap.com and hosted at charityluba.com. The domain name was registered on Feb 7 2012 and it's just 1 year old.

Why was I interested in knowing who owns Naijafinder? Well, it was because I noticed a couple of my website posts were being copied and republished on their website. Naijafinder should know it can do better that follow the path of plagiarism which doesn't pay in the long term.

Naijafinder is not a name of a person but of a website that is into content publishing using a General discussion forum software. Content on Naijafinder is most likely contributed by a lot of users who probably don't use their real names and also use unoriginal posts copied from other Nigerian websites. The admin of that website ought to know that it pays to moderate well and prevent people from posting copied work from other websites without giving a link back, at least for courtesy sake.

There is probably nothing wrong in borrowing a word or two or even an idea from an article published at another website but copying articles word for word from another website is simply not an intelligent way to start building a website. In the long term, you may end up with a lot of complaints to Google about your plagiarized work and then you'd have to start all over again.

I never knew a day would come when internet publishers in Nigeria would start copying other people's work rather than creating original works of their own.

Most search engines like Google don't take too kindly to plagiarized content and in the short term, they may overlook it but after a while, they give you the Google slam.

The best way to build a website is by making use of original content even if it's small. Millions of plagiarized works are not better than hundreds of original works. Naijafinder doesn't need to keep copying other people's articles just to remain relevant to Nigeria's cyberspace and sites that follow their path are only building themselves up for failure.