Couple of days back I stumbled on a blog that had some interesting eCommerce, working from home and small business articles. While browsing through their collection of articles I came across three articles that were blindly copied from us. I was hoping to see some acknowledgment for the source of these articles but was quite upset to see a byline in which the author had shamelessly taken credit for those articles.

I am not the first person experiencing online plagiarism where some other site steals and republishes content without any credit or link back. In fact there are many spammy sites that earn money out of someone else's work. So here are some simple ways that can help you tackle online plagiarism:

There are number of services that can help you deal with such situations, you can discover sites that copy your content and report such behavior as well. 

To begin with, you must be be aware all your republished content on the web and keep a check on sites that do not acknowledge the source. Copyscape is one such service that can help you detect online plagiarism. All you need to do is submit the link of your blog and it will produce results of all the sites that has content similar to  yours. Have a look at the video below to learn more about Copyscape:

When you discover someone copying your content and not giving you credit for it, the first thing you should do is contact the owner of that site or blog. Humbly request them to either give you credit for your content or remove the post immediately. In case that blog or site has no 'contact us' page, then try to find them various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or Digg.

When I contacted the blog that was copying our content requesting them to credit the original source of those articles, this is the reply that I receive:

"Yes, you are right, it should have been there, will add it from next time...in case I happen to do it again."

Are you kidding me?

So when you receive no conclusive response here's what you can do:


Try Google Webmaster Tools: Spam Report






Visit Google Webmaster Tools, and go to spam report page where you have to provide following details:

• The URL of the site that is copying your content. 
• The query that generates results for the other site for your content on Google.
• The page result of that query. 

"In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammy websites from our index immediately, so they don't show up in search results at all. At a minimum, we'll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results." 

You will have to give Google couple of days before it removes the offending site from its index.

You can also use another service called Fairshare, a web service that detects content that has been copied from your RSS feeds.



















All you need to do is submit the URL of your RSS feeds with them. You will have to register with the site. Once you do, it will provide you with following options:




















Fairshare sends you report in your feed, you choose your favorite reader and opt to receive updates either on daily basis or weekly basis. Not only does it detect blogs but also looks for copied content in Facebook and various forums.

As a last resort you can file a legal complaint to the technical support of the web hosting company where the domain is hosted. You can try whois.net which detects the hosting company where the domain is hosted, such hosting companies usually have a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) page where you can report the domain name that is guilty of copying your content without your consent.

If this also doesn't work, then I suggest that you seek legal help from an attorney. I sincerely hope that one doesn't have to take such an extreme step and the issue is resolved in the first step itself. But if doesn't, then you have all the right to receive credit for all your hard work and creativity...don't let anyone get away with it.

If you know of some more methods or services that can help various bloggers deal with online plagiarism, then do share them with us in the comment section below.


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