Reference number: CH000897

How can I check if anyone is stealing my website content?

Question:

How can I check if anyone is stealing my website content?

Answer:

Unfortunately with the ease of anyone being able to copy information contained on your website or blog and post it on their own it's almost inevitable that someone is going to copy your information. Thankfully there are several different methods and services on the Internet that help allow you to determine if any of your content has been placed on other pages on the Internet. Below is a short list of different methods of finding plagiarized material.

Copyscape

http://www.copyscape.com/

Copyscape is a great utility that allows a user to enter a URL of the page they wish to check and display any results of any other pages that are using any of the content on the web page URL entered.

Content-cop

http://www.content-cop.com/

Content-copy is a great software program that runs on your computer and keeps you notified of any other sites copying any of your content.

Google

http://www.google.com/

In addition to the above recommendations you can also use Google or other popular search engines as a way to find content that has been plagiarized. For example, if you have a popular section on your site simply copying a few lines into a Google search can pull up results of users with the same content.

Example content:
This example content is unique to the site, it's original, and it's mine.

Copying and pasting the above line of text into Google, surrounded by quotes will cause Google to perform an exact match on that string and display any matches if found. For example, you would be searching for: "This example content is unique to the site, it's original, and it's mine."

Finally, in addition to the above suggestions for programs used to help detect and protect your content from being used on other sites. We also suggest that you make sure a copyright notice is posted at the bottom of each of your pages and that you create a terms of use section that explains if and how users can use content on your web page.