Plagiarism has taken on a new form since the creation of blogs on the internet. It’s much easier to steal another person’s content and seemingly pass it off as your own; this is mostly due to the vast size of the internet. It can be next to impossible to tell that your content has even been taken by someone else, unless you have the time to sit down and actually search through almost every single webpage and blog that exists out there. However, there are some helpful tools that you can use to determine if your content has been stolen or not.
Copyscape: Copyscape is an easy online plagiarism tool that can be used to determine whether there is a theft of your content. By inputting the URL of your blog or webpage, Copyscape will return a list of any website that have copies of your content. Copyscape also comes with paid services: Copysentry monitors webpages and will send you an email if there is duplicate content found, and Copyscape Premium verifies the original of content that has been purchased by online content publishers.
CopyGator: CopyGator makes it easy to check if your blog’s content has been copied and published somewhere else. Simply input the URL of your website, and CopyGator will pull together data from over two million websites in order to determine if your content has been plagiarized. Returned posts are labelled “near” or “exact”; the former means that your blog and another website contain similar content, but it is not an exact copy. The service is free, and only requires you to input a single line of HTML code onto your website, and CopyGator does the rest for you. The image banner will even turn red if there has been suspicious activity.
Plagiarisma: Plagiarisma allows you to paste raw text, input a URL, or upload a word document, and the site will let you know what content has been copied. Content that is original is in yellow, while copied content is in grey; this makes it easy for you to figure out what content is being plagiarized. The service is entirely free, but it requires creating an account and only five documents can be scanned per day.
DupliChecker: DupliChecker is a free online detection software that checks to see if your websites contents are being copied. You can either copy-paste your text or upload a .txt file, click on the “Search” button, and get your results in a few seconds.
PlagSpotter: PlagSpotter is an online tool that can be used to check for duplicate content. All you need to do is input your URL, and a list of sources that have duplicated your blog content will be returned. By signing up for an account, you can get reports on how much of your content is being duplicated, your blog will be monitored for plagiarism, and you’ll receive emails with warnings of what content is being stolen.
Tynt: Tynt provides a service that alerts you on how many times your content is being copied and pasted. A simple code needs to be place on your website in order for Tynt to track any suspicious activity. When your content is copied and pasted, Tynt will forcefully add a link on that website back to your blog.
Once you’ve discovered that your content is being stolen, all you need to do is provide the evidence to the stealing website’s service provider. It shouldn’t be long before the website is taken down, which removes one more content-stealing thief from the internet. Closely monitoring these activities will be useful in preventing further thefts of your blog content in the future.
