How To Use Copycape To Detect And Prevent Online Plagiarism
You’ve worked long and hard doing your online research and creating online content that will maximize traffic and conversions…
… And one day you realize your content has been plagiarized (read stolen) by another website!
What Can You Do About It?
Online plagiarism (also known as content theft) is becoming a huge problem. Left unchecked, you may end up being penalized in your search engine rankings because of duplicate content penalty…
… Your online content USED to be unique… but not any more!
Fortunately, here’s what you can do if you face such a problem:
1) Go to http://www.copyscape.com and enter your own web page URL starting with your main domain e.g. www.domain.com
Any web page on the internet found to be plagiarizing your webpage content will be identified by Copyscape
2) Visit each result identified by Copyscape by clicking on the title of the result.
You’ll be brought to the offending web page and Copyscape will highlight the words and phrases matching your content.
3) Save a copy of the offending web page to your computer by selecting File >> Save Page on your browser menu
If possible, perform a complete website backup of the offending site using an offline browser software
4) Read Copyscape’s excellent online guide on "Responding to Plagiarism": http://www.copyscape.com/respond.php
The good news is that Google takes online plagiarism very seriously. And Google’s response to legitimate claims of copyright infringement "may include removing or disabling access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating subscribers"
Source: http://www.google.com/dmca.html
5) Deter others from plagiarizing your website content by following the steps laid out in Copyscape’s online guide "Preventing Plagiarism": http://www.copyscape.com/prevent.php
Follow the above steps and you’ll be able to sleep more soundly at night, knowing your content is safer from online plagiarists!
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Thanks so much for publishing this information. You’re so right about the excessive plagiarism on the net and we need to do everything possible to challenge it. Even though we might not eliminate the practice, at least we can put people on notice as often as possible.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that an amazing amount of intellectual property that is published on the net doesn’t even carry the critical and ever so easy to use IP marks for copyright, trademark, etc.
Rosemary Hauschild, MBA
Intellectual Property Coach
Minneapolis, MN – USA
763.559.9307
rosemary@impactcoaching.biz
Just a heads up on this one, you might also be interested in Bitscan (bitscan.com) and their Copy Alerts product (copyalerts.com). The prrevious works like Copyscape, but without the limited number of results for a free search, and the latter works more like Google Alerts, emailing you with matches.
The second note that I want to make is that, if the site is hosted within the U.S., you don’t need to file a DMCA notice with Google, you can do it against the host and have them remove the infringing material. It works more quickly, is easier to do in most cases and actually removes the content from the Web,
If I can help in any way, please let me know!