Catching the Plagiarists
I did a call the other night about blogging, and one of the questions I was asked was, “How can I tell if someone else has already used the material I bought from an outsourcer?” I didn’t have a good web software or other source for that, and it bothered me. I’m known for having the answers, and when I’m asked a question I can’t answer fuly, well… I can’t rest until I find an answer and provide it.
What I’ve done to track down dupe content in the past is just to grab a unique phrase from whatever it is, and Google it. You’d be surprised at how Google can catch stuff like that. But, it’ s certainly not a foolproof solution.
Today, I found a site called “CopyScape,” and it’s not a hidden resource. In fact, Google partners with them to find dupe content on the Web. You can run a free search there for any web page, or you can pay $0.05 per search for content pieces. That means, you can do lots of searches very inexpensively. You can also monitor your content for folks, who might be pulling it right from your site. That’s pretty sweet, if you worry about that sort of thing.
It’s happened to me. Someone decided to rip off my blog verbatim, and put it on his own blog without proper attribution. Grr. As a professional writer, that really pisses me off!
But I’m lucky with outsource content. I have two really great outsource people that I trust.
But if I were buying a lot of articles from Elance.com, or one of the other outsource sites, from people that I didn’t know, you can betcha I’d be using CopyScape to check every piece before I paid good money for recycled articles. You should, too.
