In my opinion, two biggest online media business enemies are spams and plagiarism. No one wants their original content copied by others and even see the duplicate ones appearing ahead of originals on search engines like Google and Bing. This kind of content copying is called as “Plagiarism” which is a serious issue on web and even search engines are taking serious steps to discourage plagiarism. But still it is very much there on web and as a publisher, I can suggest few online plagiarism checker tools to find copied contents for your original work i.e. to find who are copying your content and publishing them on their high ranked websites. I use some of them on daily basis to check copied content from my website and blog network.
1. Google Alert – Add a Google Alert fro few keywords related to your site, for example “Your website Name” or “Important and Exclusive Keywords like product name”. Now whenever someone on web will write something about that thing, you will receive a notification email in your Inbox. You can use Google Alert as an online plagiarism checker tool. It is free to use as well.
2. Copyscape – A very popular service to find out online plagiarism. You just need to enter the URL of the page for which you want to see copied contents. Copyscape will show you plagiarism cases for that particular URL. With free account, you can see few results, but you may opt for premium service to find more plagiarism results on Copyscape. Lot many webmasters are using Copyscape as an online plagiarism checker.
3. CopyrightSpot – Another plagiarism detection online tool which is similar to Copyscape. Follow steps similar to Copyscape to find the duplicate or copied content on web through this tool.
4. WordPress Dashboard Incoming Links – WordPress users are having a section on dashboard where they can see “Incoming Links” for their blog. Actually WordPress uses Google Blog Directory to find the backlinks and show the latest backlink sources in that section of dashboard. You can go ahead and click on the links to find whether the backlinks are proper links or someone is just using your full content with links. It is not a suggested feature by WordPress for checking online plagiarism, but you can use this section in that way as well.
[ad id=’7′ style=’float:left;margin:10px 10px 10px 0′]5. Yahoo Site Explorer – Find backlinks on Yahoo Site Explorer and track each of them to see whether any plagiarism case is there or not. Similarly you can use Google Link feature but that will show very few backlinks only.
6. Tynt – For publishers, Tynt is a useful tool to spread the website link to more people and social media. Whenever someone copy the content from Tynt enable website, it will add a link at the bottom and let the publisher know that who has copied the content and what he did. This way, publisher can also find the plagiarism cases if content is pasted on a website page.
7. Unique Content Verifier – It is a freeware to find the copied text from one source to another on web. It means, you have to just enter a text string in input box, and then this tool will try to find the sources where the same text is also available. You can type long text strings to find the copied contents and links. This way it works as an online plagiarism checker desktop tool.
To prevent plagiarism, you can add Copyscape banner on your website to let others know that you are very serious about plagiarism and you can take further action on copied content. Other popular way is to add Creative Commons to protect your original work.
What next after detecting Online Plagiarism
Using above tools, you can who are copying your content or responsible for plagiarism. Now its time to stop that and tell those bad guys about the steps that you can take for this serious matter. Here are few steps that you can take after finding plagiarism.
– Contact the blogger or website owner thru contact form available on their website
– Find the owner’s email ID using WhoIs and send a “Cease and Desist (C & D) mail stating the link of their website which is copied from yours.
– Ask Google and Other Search Engines to remove copied or duplicate content from index. Search engines are having contact forms to submit the plagiarism cases and they will manually verify the facts and take further action. You can use DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and submit the link of the site for proper ban and legal actions.
There are few WordPress plugins and JavaScripts which protects your content from copying either by disabling the mouse right click or by disabling selection. But that creates problem for viewers who wants to share your content with friend and family through email as well or wants to quote your website on messenger. That’s why I would suggest you to keep checking, tracking and take action on regular basis to prevent plagiarism rather than using that kind of Scripts.