Site Plagiarism

One of my very active blogs has a continual problem with plagiarism, to the point that it is simply content theft. Posts that I make on a subject are taken and posted on other sites which are then surrounded with Google advertisements or similar. They hope, I imagine, that a Google search for a particular term will cause people to visit their site rather than mine, and then click on one of the Google adverts, generating income.

Battling this sort of theft is a drawn out process, which despite the technology of the current day and age, still requires an actual letter, envelope and stamp to send notification to Google to get any action on their behalf. Strange for the world’s largest Search Engine to use such a technique to discourage complaints. However, this article is not about that, or Google, but finding sites that have stolen your content.

There are (I am sure) many tools out there for assisting, and one that I have been using is called Copyscape.

You enter the URL of your web page, and Copyscape trawls the net looking for occurrences. I don’t use a paid subscription version of it, so I am not sure how much better it can be, but at least it is a start.