How to Identify, Prevent, and Stop Blog Plagiarism

Imagine that you’ve worked really hard on a unique, useful blog post, only to find out that someone else has taken your content, posted it on their own site, and is taking credit for what you wrote. It’s infuriating, isn’t it? Unfortunately, blog plagiarism is a widespread problem that’s not going away anytime soon.

Plagiarism is immoral, sure, and it’s even illegal if the stolen content has been copyrighted by the original author, but it can be a challenge to enforce on the internet. The worst thing about stolen blog content is that it can actually hurt your blog traffic. How, you ask? Well, Google values unique content (online content that is 100% original)  above all else. But when someone else has plagiarized your blog content and posted it on their own site, they’ve created duplicate content, which Google doesn’t like at all. The issue with duplicate content is that search engines often can’t tell which occurrence of the content is the original one. You’re essentially competing against your own content! Therefore, the search engines don’t know which instance of the content to show, and they may either show the wrong (stolen) content, or none of it at all. If your content doesn’t show up in Google search results, users won’t find your post on Google, and won’t click through to read your blog. So, even though you’ve done everything right, this jerk who stole your content has also cost you traffic.

In today’s post, we’re going to review how to identify when someone has plagiarized your blog content, how to stop them from doing so, and how to prevent it in the first place.

Identifying Plagiarism:

The first thing you’ll want to do is identify when someone is stealing your blog content. There are a ton of free plagiarism checkers out there (just do a quick Google search to find them) but the best one is Copyscape.

Copyscape’s free version may work for you. See what happens when I plug  this URL, featuring Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven,” and plugged it into Copyscape. Check out the results:

Copyscape’s free offering only shows the top ten results, but that’s probably more than enough. Poe’s renowned poem is copied across the internet thousands and thousands of times. Your blog content won’t be. For example, I ran a check for an older post from a popular blog A Cup of Jo, and the only result returned was Joanna’s blog itself.

You could also use an old standby: Google. Just plug your blog post headline or, even better (since headlines are short and not always 100% unique) the first paragraph into Google and see what comes up. When I copy the first paragraph of this well-known post by The Bloggess, and plug it into Google, almost six thousand results come up!

Now, not all of these results are necessarily plagiarism. Some may be reposts on social media, some may be snippets posted with credit and/or permission, and as you get further down in the results, they may just be pages with coincidentally similar wording. But at the very least, you can see how often the content is recurring on the web.

To get more use out of Google, try setting up  Google Alerts for your best blog posts. Add your blog titles to Google Alerts and then get notified when someone else uses them. It’s not a foolproof plan, but it could help.

The thing about the free checkers is that you need to check them manually, again and again. It might not be that much of an issue to check a handful of blog URLs once a month, but what about when you’ve got a couple dozen or even a few hundred blog posts under your belt? At that point, you may want to invest in a service that finds copies of your pages automatically. Copyscape’s product Copysentry will check for copies of your website content on a daily or weekly basis, but there are costs involved. If plagiarism is a one-off issue, you may not want to spend the money on an automatic checker, but if your content is stolen on a regular basis, it may be a good idea to invest.

Stopping Plagiarism:

So you’ve found someone who’s stolen your content. Now, how do you get them to remove it?

Unfortunately, it’s tough. The internet is kind of like the Wild West – there are rules, but nobody’s really around to enforce them. Still, there are definite steps that you can take:

1. Take screenshots of the offending content. Just in case you need them for proof.
2. Ask them to remove the stolen content. Be polite but very firm.  Give them a deadline and let them know that, if the stolen content hasn’t been removed from that site by that deadline, you’ll be forced to take further action.
3. Send a Cease and Desist letter. The purpose of this letter is to order the plagiarizer to stop displaying your stolen content, and never do it again, or else you’ll take legal action against them. Don’t worry if you’re not sure exactly how to word the letter; you can find a customizable template on Plagiarism Today. Give them a short deadline – just a few days – and if they still haven’t complied, it’s time to take the next step.
4. Send a DMCA Takedown Notice to the offender’s webhost. DCMA refers to the Digital Millennium Liability Act of 1998, under which web hosting companies are held responsible for the content they host. If the blog author isn’t cooperative, the host will most likely remove the stolen content in a timely fashion. To find out where a website is hosted, you can use Webhosting Hero – just plug in the domain and it’ll tell you where the site is hosted. You can find more information about the DMCA and a sample letter at DMCA Info.

Preventing Plagiarism:

As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Wouldn’t you rather avoid this whole mess in the first place? Unfortunately, you can’t, but you can at least take steps to prevent plagiarism.

1. Add a visible copyright notice to your blog. According to the U.S. Copyright office, “your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. ” But if you have a visible copyright notice, it may deter plagiarizers from stealing your work. For a sample copyright message, check out WordPress’ verbiage. Add the message to your RSS feeds too, so that nobody steals content directly from your feed.
2. Add your own personality to your content. Content pirates can’t pass your content off as their own as easily if it’s chock-full of your personality, personal photos, etc. Content that gets stolen tends to be more generic and easy to pass off as someone else’s.
3. Set up Google+ Authorship to claim your content as your own. This will help ensure that your content is linked to you in Google. If you need an authorship refresher, check out our post.
4. Watermark your photos. And stay tuned, because later this month, we’ll have an entire post about what to do if someone steals your blog photos!

And Don’t Plagiarize!

Of course you wouldn’t – not on purpose, anyway. But often, plagiarism is unintentional, so be diligent. If you feature other bloggers’ content on your site, just include a snippet, and link back to the original content. If you’re trying another blogger’s recipe or how-to, even if you change it up a little bit, credit them for the inspiration with a shout-out and a link. It’s better to be safe than sorry, and it’s always a good idea to build strong relationships with other bloggers instead of angering them!