Aspiring writers, freelancers, bloggers and students take note! There’s a new war against plagiarism heightened by the recent rash of content theft, more notably amongst bloggers and freelance journalists. Here are 5 simple detect plagiarism of your content.
1. How to Look for Copies of your Work Online
Undoubtedly the most well known in the field for fast, accurate searches, Copyscape is every plagiarist’s nightmare! It functions by finding sites that have copied content without permission simply by typing in your URL. Copyscape is free, but has a premium edition that allows more powerful tools like batch Search, which you can use to check your entire site for copies in a single click, up to 10,000 pages.
2. How to Detect Plagiarism in the Work of Others
Article Checker has been around for a long time, as its classic look belies. However, the adage “old is gold” certainly holds true, as this site has been time-tested to be reliable in what it claims to do. Simply copy and paste the text of the article you want to search for, and Article Checker will scour either Google, Yahoo, or both for signs of plagiarism online. This can be useful if you’re an editor trying to root out the “real” writers from the “copy & paste”-rs.
Alternatively you may also want to check out The Plagiarism Checker developed by the University of Maryland which processes documents and intelligently decides which phrases to searches on.
3. How to Remove the Possibility of being Falsely Accused of Plagiarism: College Students Alert!
Created with college students in mind, PlagiarismDetect is a relatively new site which requires registration for a free account. It promises detection for text and phrases to ensure assignments are 100% original, which means that students can now think ahead to prevent being wrongly accused of plagiarism. However, that’s not to say that others can’t benefit from its services as well.
It even supports document uploads so you can just send it your entire assignment for it to be processed. The site has proven to be accurate and encourages users to use it on a regular basis as newer and more advanced features are being added to it by the day.
4. How to check for Plagiarism using Yahoo! Search
This site has received numerous recommendations all over the web, so it’s worth a shot. Plagium is a reliable site which has makes use of Yahoo’s Search API to search the Internet for plagiarism. As far as efficiency is concerned, ratings have shown that it does nearly as well as CopyScape Premium, so you can rest assured that it will deliver results.
It has a clean and simple interface which doesn’t support ads, so for all those ad-haters out there, this site is especially for you. Just make sure to donate a little to support their cause.
5. How to Root Out Plagiarism Offenders…and Get Your Fair Share of Money!
Fair Share is a free service site that helps detect plagiarism via RSS feeds. In a matter of seconds, you’ll get results in a personalized RSS feed encompassing billions of websites. Targeted at bloggers and Webmasters who want to keep track of how their content is being used, by whom and where, Fair Share works with Creative Commons licenses to sniff out where content reappears, how often it is used and whether the content is linked or not.
An excellent choice for bloggers and others who can’t afford or don’t have the time to use a more advanced system. Plus, as the above picture suggests, you can even demand payment from the ad networks who run the plagiarized content!
Bonus Links for Reference
- 13 Simple Tactics to Prevent, Detect Content Plagiarism – A great preventive guide on how to deal with content plagiarism
- WordPress Plugin: Digital Fingerprint — detecting content theft – An awesome wordpress plugin which helps you track down content stolen from you
- Reduce Content Theft with WP-CopyRight Pro WordPress Plugin – A wordpress plugin which disables copying from your site (I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s too extreme and whether it hurts you more in the long run)
- How to Report Abuse to WordPress.com – A guide to reporting spam and abuse to WordPress.com
- How to Deal with Online Plagiarism: When People Copy your Blog Articles Without Permission – An excellent step by step manual on how to deal with plagiarism when it happens to you.
- Plagiarism Today – An up to date resource on the topic
This article was written by Aaron Pek & James Yeang. Contact me if you wish to become a writer for this blog.
Good article, I like the one for college students!!
Very helpful list you have here :). Now, I think every online publisher or blogger needs Copyscape.
Copyscape is cool. Just know that got such tool to check copied content. ;)
@Senthil/Shirley/Jayce: Glad to have helped – caught anyone stealing your stuff so far?
Oh yes, so much theft! Mainly from article directories – it’s why I found your article this morning!
I was whining away about it in an email:
“Anyhoo, article marketing – I find it a nightmare! Within one day of my first article going live, it was ‘scraped’. I now have 30 articles on e-zines. They are very popular – but for theft! They are skimmed, stolen, posted all over the web (I google alert each title) multiple times per week, and more often than not, no links are included, the resource box is removed, as are any links, and if they are, they link only back to e-zines!
So I find it has been a big waste of time really, I really have been providing free content for niche bloggers who do not do the right thing. Automatic skimmers that take parts of the content and throw it up on their sites – aargh!
Yes I have some back-links, but the negatives far outweigh the helpful seo. Now I’m posting all articles to my blog instead. Not sure whether I should bother with the article directories at all?
As e-zines won’t allow any links ‘above the fold’, all these sites just ripping off the top half, claiming it as their own – it’s MOST frustrating.”
I’ll be looking into a few of these links for new strategies.
Charndra
Nobody loves plagiarism.. in my blog i love to write by myself and it’s original content :)
care to exchange links dear?
thanks for that, i will be sure to test the free versions of the programs above. We’re doing a load of copy writing and don’t want to steal or have others steal our content.
@Charndra @Shetreasures @York : Glad I could help – if you find anymore new ones, pls do feel free to drop a comment :)
Copying without authorization and profiting your self out of it is against the copyright law which is common to every one. You’ll not probably be sued by law if you are doing it in the internet, but Google will definitely sued you. And that will reflect in your status.
Just want to add one more, http://www.duplichecker.com.
how can you forget this amazing site
i always submit to article directories to gain backlinks, most of them are free anyway ;