The Importance of Referencing an Online Article

The Importance of Referencing an Online Article

February 27, 2025

By Thals Volmar

It is a bit difficult for more than one to pose the difference between an online article and a blog; we will not emphasize the former, because what interests us is simple: how can we make an online article credible?

A blog in its true sense is a web page where an individual or a small group of individuals called author(s) undertakes.s a written conversation with readers or adherents; often in this type of conversation, readers or adherents have the means to leave comments or share their opinions. Today, a blog is more than that, it is intended to be one or more pages or sections on a website where one can find articles, search results, texts, etc., which fall within the framework of publication for educational, informational, advertising purposes, etc.

Therefore, a blog is a space for publishing useful and reliable content if we want to stay close to our customers and improve our presence on search engines. In the United States for example, almost all types of organizations today use blog sections on their site to communicate with their audience; a blog in this case can take on various connotations, and not all of them are converged towards a single goal. In the first quarter of 2025, there are more than 600 million blogs in the world with 7.5 million posts per day (ref); these posts are varied in scope and styles, but the ones that interest us the most are the articles.

An article, unlike an informal piece of writing, is a subject developed by an author following a classic schema, that is, it is a discussed theme. An article can be a report, a topic, an analysis, etc., however, as we mentioned above, with the growing numbers of articles written online, the situation has become perplexing. Although the algorithms of search engines like Google, Bing, etc., have the ability to detect and prioritize original articles by taking into account various parameters, the web is still full of articles that are not reliable.

Certainly, an article written and intended to be published on a blog page does not necessarily follow the same stages of development as one written for academic and highly professional purposes, nevertheless, a minimum standard must be taken into consideration. A minimum standard that is respected in an article can make it credible on the web, that said, an article written in an original style (absence of plagiarism) and which has reference(s). The reference(s) we mention here is/are linked to the author(s) and the publication date of the article.

 An author who publishes an article online with his/her name and the publication date assumes that the article was written by a person, that is, either a minimum of thinking was applied, or a minimum of research was carried out. On this basis, readers are assured that such an article is not the work of artificial intelligence and that it is an old or new article. We strongly encourage organizations to take this minimum prerequisite into account when publishing their articles online, this leads them to publish more or less reliable content.