Posts Tagged ‘copyscape’

• Checking for content plagiarism

  Sunday, July 26th, 2009

  One of the growing problems on the Web is the plagiarism of content, usually through content scrapers or similar.

  If you want to check whether your content has been stolen and is being used by another website, we recommend  using either Copyscape, fairshare, Plagium, or for a particular article, a free service such as article checker.

  Copyscape offers both free and paid services. With search credits for individual page searches starting at only $0.05 (minimum buy 100=$5), it is an inexpensive and efficient way to check for anyone plagiarisng your content. And Copyscape is the gold standard for copy checkers.

  Fairshare is a newer service but does offer an interesting beta recompense scheme for those whose work has been re-used elsewhere.

  Plagium requires you to paste in the text rather than the specific URL (as Copyscape does), but seems to give more detailed results because it does not check any of the navigational elements on the page.

  If you suspect that your work is being re-used, or have evidence that it is being, there is a practical guide to dealing with Plagiarism by Copyscape which includes details of how to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) infringement notice with the search engines.

  

  Tags: content checker, copyscape, Fairshare, plagiarise, Plagiarism, Plagium, Web page, website
  Posted in Content, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks

• Using automated article writing software – DON'T!

  Sunday, July 26th, 2009

  As a native English speaker, I shudder when I read internet marketing articles about SEO that contain the most appalling English. Prime examples of this crop up all over blogs where it is blatantly obvious that automated article writing software has been used to generate content.

  Here is one such example:

  SEO is a process of improving the traffic to your website from the search engines by using high quality content. It is a rich internet marketing strategy which considers how search engines work and what people search for. Try to place your web page as top as possible so that the indexed search will list your site first which has higher page rank and drive you more traffic.

  Hmmm!

  Yes, content is important, but not so important that you damage your own reputation by using software which cannot ever replace a good copywriter. If you plan to use such tools, at least read ALOUD any article produced and check that it reads well and doesn’t contain basic grammatical errors.

  However, there are better versions of article autowrite tools that search the Net for sentences to use in your chosen article, and therefore you are just plagiarising other people’s work, ergo it is not unique content. It is quite possible with the huge amount of content now available online that your imagination will come up with a sentence that has been used elsewhere already, particularly on popular topics, but it is highly unlikely that an article you write from your own creative juices will contain multiple repeated sentences that have been pre-published elsewhere.

  However, there may be potential uses for article writing software for SEO research. For instance, you can use these type of tools (which are generally cheap) to find top level sites and related keywords and put this research easily into a report for your clients when they need to do a keyword brainstorm with contextual content.There are plenty of other tools to do such a job though – a search engine, Notepad, and Ctrl C Ctrl V springs to mind!

  Whenever you create any content, however you choose to do it, ensure that it reads well, is high quality, grammatically correct English, and that it passes copyscape.

  

  Tags: article writing, automated article writing tools, content creation, copyscape, Search engine optimization
  Posted in Content, SEO, Tips & Tricks