An Easier Way To Find Duplicate Content and Plagiarism (And It’s Free!)
By Mike Walker (@mizike24)
GSI Search Specialist
You may or may not have heard of or used the search engine Copyscape before, but this site can be useful for SEOs and copywriters.
I found out about it through an article I read on Search Engine Watch by Carrie Hill. Basically, you enter a URL into Copyscape and it crawls the web and gives you results of sites that have duplicate or similar content to the URL you punched in. It’s a great way to find plagiarists if you write copy or original content. If you are an SEO, this will assist in identifying duplicate content that you wish to help the client get rid of or manage.
Results can vary, but I played around with it using several client pages that I have worked on for months and know very well. Copyscape allowed me to identify duplicate content within the client’s own domain. I think this can be a great time saver and a big assist for SEOs.
There is also Plagium, which allows you to search by URL and text. It is still in beta and I have not heard as much about it from authoritative SEOs as I have about Copyscape. Plagium will give you a SERP page after you search by URL or text, but also gives you a visual timeline on when the dupes were last cached. I prefer Copyscape as it uses Google’s API technology, therefore I can trust the accuracy of its search capabilities.
At this time I recommend using Copyscape as it is free (although you can also pay for their CopySentry service, which monitors the web regularly for plagiarism of your content). Play around with it yourself to see if it can meet your needs.
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Tags: Copyscape, CopySentry, duplicate content, plagiarism, Plagium
