[HowTo] Know if someone is copying your Blogposts?

I was at the Bangalore Barcamp 6 or the BCB6 as it is popularly known and one of the most important doubt queried there was related to Copying of Blogs, Plagiarism. Lets learn how to know if someone is copying your blog contents and the next steps after that.

Copyspace is a free service which makes it easier for you to find copies of your contents on the web. All you need to do is type in the address of your blog or webpage and Copyscape does the rest. Copyscape finds out the sites which have copied your content without permission and also those which have quoted you. However, Copyscape only provides first 10 searches free, in order to get more searches, you need to be a premium user.

Once you have figured out the names of the blogs or webpages copying your content, the next step is to go ahead and figure out the details about the owner of this blog / webpage. The best way to do this is going ahead with the About page of the blog or website, Usually the About page has all the details you need to contact the website or blog owner. In case, if that doesn’t work out you should do a WhoIs search. To do a WhoIs search, point your browser to the URL http://whois.net. WhoIs.net is a free service which provides with the WhoIs records of the owner of the website.

Once you have the details of the copying blog or website with you, the first step is usually going ahead and dropping a nice email asking for attribution. If the copying blogger responds back, good for him/her, otherwise you might have to go ahead and file an official DMCA Complaint or even contact its advertising partners like Adsense. Amit Agarwal has an interesting list of To-do’s on this topic. You can find his post on dealing with online plagiarism here.

Update: Copyscape also has an excellent resource page which has excellent material on content plagiarism. [ Thanks to Himanshu Sheth for this pointer.]

You can also go ahead and read my previous post on Getting all the technical information about a website like the technology it was built using, SEO profile and Hosting details.

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Cheers

Vaibhav