How to Avoid Online Plagiarism

Today, I want to discuss a huge issue that is online with websites and website content. Plagiarism. This tutorial is to cover how to avoid online plagiarism because many do not realize how easy it is to accidentally duplicate the same thing even if you have never seen the source.  So let's talk about how plagiarism can hurt your online business for a minute. 

Search engines have something that is called "Backlisted Sites" now this should really be called something different like "No traffic Sites" because that is what happens when you become "backlisted" from plagiarized content. If you are placed on a back list on any of the search engines your views will demolish within a 24 hours. As we can image this is something no business or blogger wants to see happen to them, so the question is how do you avoid plagiarism? What happens when you honestly did not know you copied someone's content? How do you know if you have copied someone's web content? Well I'm going to answer all of this and more now.

1.        If you know your taking someone's work like a news article, or some type of information you feel readers need to see avoid plagiarism by referencing the source. This is simple to do. Name of the original Author, Date, and Link to original post. This is honestly just being honest and being respectful of the person whom wrote it.

2.    Copyright your website and any content you put online if you do not your putting yourself at risk of being copied. HTML code for the copyright  © sign: ©  Put this on your website, blog, pictures, and more or you can become the next victim of plagiarism. 

3.        What if you are not sure if anything is plagiarized on your website? How do you check this? Thankfully, there are many plagiarism checkers available online. Some ask you to copy and paste in content to find if there is anything on the web that is exactly the same. Now of course words like "like, sell, online, free, etc" will always show up plagiarized because of how many sites use these. The main point is to make sure your not fully plagiarizing a source. 

Here are a Few Sites where you can check this: 

http://www.copyscape.com/prevent.php

http://www.duplichecker.com/

http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/

Each link offers a different way of checking. Now I typically use all of them because I want to keep my site as original as possible and mine with as little similar phrases as possible. Which is why I am constantly changing it and making it better. 

4.      What if you run into a website that really looks close to yours??? Now what? Well as I was searching for a lot of these links for my own use, I found a similarity tester. This looks for how similar your website is with someone else's. I have tried this one 1 time with a friends site just to see what would happen for this tutorial and it picks up on a percentage of how similar your site is. Of course my friends site was completely different but you will still see a similarity of like 5% if your using common phrases which is typically the problem with anyone. 

I've been plagiarized Now What???

Now that you know your site has been plagiarized what do you do with this. (I'm hoping no one ever faces this but its the web and anything is possible here). 

1.      If the website that has copied or stolen something from you has contact information kindly message them and ask them to remove it. Now I must warn you this can blow up in the sense of the person becomes angry so be prepared for the worst situation.

2.   If they have no contact information try e-mailing them with webmaster@domain name.com this typically sends it to the webmaster of the site. 

3. First 2 fails, use the Whois database because 99% of the time those whom register a domain have a Whois listing. 

4. Now its time to contact the web hosting company and inform them that this website has copied your work and you want it removed.              

5. Worst case scenario you can file a form through google that will take the site off search engines sometimes this is best if the person continues to copy you in some way and all your efforts to resolve this issue with the web site owner fails. 

Personally, I would much rather receive a message kindly letting me know I have the same content as someone else than someone jumping over me thinking I would be rude. Now granted you never know how someone else will act but that really is a chance I would rather take than have my website backlisted just because someone could not take the time to message me. I typically change my website once a month in some way to ensure its new, fresh, etc. and prefer that message from a kind person than anything else.

I hope no one has to ever use this but just in case this is how you can prevent it.

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