Identifying Duplicate Content on the Web

Posted by Michelle Harrington on Jun 7th, 2009

Ever wonder if someone has stolen your website copy?  Writing quality content for your website or hiring a professional to do it involves an investment of time and/or money and there’s nothing more irritating than having another website owner come along and copy it.   Not to mention the fact that Google may penalize a site for having duplicate content if it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.

If you suspect that your website content has been stolen, you can use www.CopyScape.com to see if you have content that is considered duplicate and where the other instances of the copy is located.

If you find that your copy has been “hijacked” then by all means contact the website/business owner to advise them that your unique original content has been found on their site and ask them to immediately remove it.  You can also claim ownership of the content and request removal of the other site from Google’s index by filing a DMCA request.

If you’ve got a website and you’ve considered just taking someone else’s content, think again – what you are doing is stealing and its not going to help you get noticed (favorably anyway) by the search engines.  Building great website content is a long-term commitment and involves an investment but the payoffs are always worth it.  So before pressing Ctrl+V (shortcut for paste) do the right thing and write your own website content.

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Author | Michelle Harrington of Emagine Web Marketing
Michelle is a web development and internet marketing professional dedicated to helping small businesses in Hawaii achieve success online. Michelle provides free advice, tips and how to's on the Small Business Internet Marketing Blog.

One Response

1. Zoe Feast says:

   September 11, 2009 at 3:19 am

   Thanks for sharing these resources, I have a client dealing with copyright infringement issues at the moment. I have not come across copyscape before it certainly works. Another useful site is http://www.archive.org which can help to establish timelines…although they are slow at spidering sites.