The Guarantee
The content Crawl Compass writes and delivers to a client is original, produced for the client's project, and run through a plagiarism check before it is delivered. Crawl Compass does not deliver spun articles, scraped passages, or content lifted from another site with minor alterations.
This guarantee covers the writing Crawl Compass produces for a client: blog posts, landing-page copy, articles, and the content that forms part of the SEO and Digital PR work it performs on the client's behalf. It is a substantive commitment. The remainder of this page sets out what it means, how it is verified, and what occurs in the rare event that it is not met.
This is not a guarantee about rankings. Original content improves a client's prospects of ranking and being cited, but no party controls Google, and Crawl Compass does not guarantee a position. This is a guarantee about the work, not the result.
What Plagiarism Is
Plagiarism is presenting another person's words or ideas as one's own without crediting them. It is an ethical and professional failure, and Crawl Compass treats it as such.
Two concepts are often conflated and should be distinguished:
- Plagiarism is an ethical matter: taking credit for work that is not one's own.
- Copyright infringement is a legal matter: copying protected work without permission or a valid exception.
The two overlap but are not identical. It is possible to plagiarize without infringing copyright, and to infringe copyright without plagiarizing. Crawl Compass avoids both; this page concerns originality primarily, with the legal dimension closely related.
Plagiarism does not include quoting a source and crediting it, referencing a statistic and linking to its origin, or building on widely known facts. Sound writing draws on genuine sources, and the distinction between legitimate use and plagiarism is whether the source is credited. Crawl Compass credits its sources.
How We Cite Rather Than Copy
Where Crawl Compass draws on another party's work, it attributes that work. A quoted line is placed in quotation marks with the source named. A statistic carries its named source, linked where possible. A paraphrase still credits the original idea. This is part of how trustworthy content is built, and part of how Crawl Compass handles E-E-A-T on the sites it works on.
Finished content will therefore sometimes contain short, properly attributed quotations and cited facts. This is legitimate and is the opposite of plagiarism. Reproducing whole passages and presenting them as original is the conduct Crawl Compass does not engage in.
How We Check
Two checks are carried out before content is delivered.
- Editorial review. A person reads the content, examining it for accuracy and quality and for any passage that reads as reproduced rather than written, or any source used without credit. Human review is where most issues are identified.
- Plagiarism-detection check. The content is run through a plagiarism checker (tools such as Copyscape are designed for this purpose) before delivery. The tool divides the text into segments and searches the web for matching passages, then flags any that appear elsewhere.
A plagiarism checker is a useful indicator, not a definitive judgment. It identifies that text matches material online; it does not determine which page was published first, whether anything was actually copied, or whether a match is a problem. A flag may indicate genuine copying, or a legitimate quotation, a phrase that two writers drew from the same source, or a common phrase used across many sites. For this reason, a person reviews each flag and makes the determination, rather than relying on a score. The tool identifies candidates; a person makes the decision.
Why Originality Matters
- It is the correct standard. A client's content should be the client's own. This is non-negotiable for Crawl Compass.
- It avoids legal exposure. Copying protected work without permission constitutes copyright infringement, with real consequences. Original content avoids that risk.
- It protects a site in search. Google's actual position is set out precisely below.
Google does not impose a "duplicate content penalty" for ordinary duplication, and has stated this on more than one occasion. Where the same or similar text appears in more than one place, Google generally selects one version to display. That is a normal part of indexing, not a penalty.
However, scraped, copied, or mass-produced content with little original value does violate Google's spam policies. Google's spam policies name "scraped content" and "scaled content abuse" directly: taking content from other sources, or producing pages at scale whose main purpose is to manipulate rankings rather than to help readers, "no matter how it's created." This can reduce rankings or result in removal from the index. The distinction is therefore that accidental duplication is not penalized, but copying or scraping to manipulate search is a genuine spam violation. Crawl Compass keeps a client on the correct side of that line by producing original work in the first instance.
Scope and Boundaries
- It covers the content Crawl Compass writes for a client. That is the work this guarantee stands behind.
- It does not cover content Crawl Compass did not write. Pre-existing copy on a client's site, text supplied by the client or a third party, and material the client publishes elsewhere are outside the control of Crawl Compass. Crawl Compass can review existing content for originality on request, but that is a separate task.
- Some overlap is normal and is not plagiarism. Common facts, standard industry phrases, product names, and required legal or compliance wording legitimately recur across the web, and a plagiarism checker may flag them. This is expected and does not indicate copying.
- Properly attributed quotations are not plagiarism. Cited and credited material is good practice, even where a checker matches it.
Remedy
If content that Crawl Compass wrote for a client fails a plagiarism check on the work of Crawl Compass, Crawl Compass rewrites it at no charge, whenever the issue is identified. There is no time limit. Where the client identifies the issue, or where the check carried out by Crawl Compass identifies it, Crawl Compass makes the content original.
This remedy applies to genuine issues with the work of Crawl Compass, not to flags that prove to be properly attributed quotations, common phrases, or content Crawl Compass did not produce. If you identify a passage on your site that you consider not original, notify Crawl Compass and it will be reviewed and corrected.