A big problem for bloggers is that there are always a lot of people that steal your content. In some instances they don’t even try to paraphrase the article so they just copy it word-for-word. I have seen this in many instances with articles that I have written and if you contact those people you’ll often get a funny response like “oh, I didn’t know I was doing that.”
If the site credits the source then that is one thing but there are many people that pass the posts of as their own writing. Copyscape makes it easy to try and find anyone who is copying your posts by looking for other blogs that match a large number of your words.
The service doesn’t cost a thing if you use less than 20 searches per month and after that it will cost $0.05 per search. If you decide to pay that money for the premium service you’ll also be able to choose sites to exclude from the search in case you already know about them.
Copyscape is a great idea and if they offered a flat monthly fee for the premium service I’m sure it would be much more popular. I could then see people creating plug-ins for blogs that make it easy to monitor for plagiarism. At least you’ll be able to track some of your more popular articles at no cost though.
Thanks for the tip. I can see this being really useful.
I think the technology relies on a large number of words being copied as you mentioned. I wrote a blog post recently that was copied, a few paragraphs were changed but I recognized the content. Copyscrape didn’t pick this one up, but it did correctly detect legitimate sites that I knew about it already. So a few sites may escape detection, but it could have good potential for spotting people who copycat word for word.
I can’t see the point of people stealing other’s ideas. It won’t gain any respect in the blogging world. If I link to another blog I always try to put my angle on the story or add something extra, always linking back to the original story.
I was able to find a few people that had copied some of my more popular articles but I only have a few more free searches left so I don’t want to use them all yet.
Thanks, Nice tip. I’m going to use that one
Not to be a silly nit-picker, but did you mean to call it “Copyscrape” on purpose in your post a few times?
“Copyscrape makes it easy to try and find anyone who is copying your posts by looking for other blogs that match a large number of your words.”
Like your image shows, it should be “Copyscape”
Anyway, I periodically use it every few weeks. Sometimes it finds other bloggers who are quoting one of my posts and once I found a bot-scrape of one of my blog-posts dumped into a robo-blog.
Pretty handy.
Cheers!
It is Copyscape Claus, I guess Ryan put that ‘r’ by mistake.
BTW, I wonder how they track your “20 searches” per month.
Do you need to have an account with them to search?
With 0.05 a search it may actually be cheaper than to have a premium account for most bloggers.
Oops, I must have imagined that extra “r” in the name.
I was wondering how they track the searches as well because I was able to do them without creating an account. I’ll be going over the limit here soon so i’ll probably know. I don’t think it would be realistic to track this by IP address.
I came across this interesting WordPress plugin. No idea if it’s any good but maybe worth a closer look.
[maxpower.ca]