Using Copyscape Premium to detect duplicate and plagiarized webpages

It is an unfortunate fact that those of us who publish content on the Internet will have our content stolen and published at other sites.

The theft is sometimes from ignorance - some people actually do not understand that they have no right to copy your work. Some think that it is fine to copy if they give you credit.

They are wrong: nobody has a right to copy your writing without your permission. Copyright has been automatic since 1989 and you don't even have to specifically say that you claim copyrights - your work is automatically protected.

More often the theft is in hope of monetary gain. The thief puts advertising onto your content when they republish it. If you were hoping to earn some advertising money yourself, that's particularly rankling. Aside from losing the authorship credit you deserve, the thief has also cut into your rightful income.

Even more maddening is if you search for subject matter related to your hub and find that an illegal copy outranks your original in the search engine results!

Detecting theft

It's actually easy enough to find these thieves. You can simply take a few important sentences from your work and paste them into Google, surrounding the selected text with quote marks ("). If there are copies, Google will find them.

I'm not going to get into what you'd do when you do find stolen content. It's easy enough to find detailed advice on what steps to take next.

The problem with the simple Google method is that it doesn't scale well. I have over 4,000 pages that I have written and published on the Internet over the many years that I have been doing this. Copying text into Google on a regular basis would consume almost all of my free time.

Free Services

There are on-line services that make this a little easier. They allow you to type in either that bit of text or the url of the page you want to check.

They are often limited to checking one url at a time and may also limit the number of url's you are allowed to check.

The output typically contains pages that might have copied your content - it's up to you to determine how serious the copying is.

Paid Services

Paid services will allow you to check many pages in a batch process. I use Copyscape Premium. Signup is simple and after you create your account, you simply purchase credits. Each search will cost 5 cents, so if you want to search 200 of your url's, you would pay $10.00 in advance. You can pay with a credit card or PayPal.

Copyscape Premium allows you to check your entire website or a subdirectory of it, type or paste in a list of url's to check, or provide an XML sitemap file (you may already produce a file like that for Google Webmaster Tools).

They also provide an API that you can use to create your own tools for batch use. The screenshot below shows Copyscape processing a recent batch.

To save myself time, I use the Adsense Content list from Google Analytics to get a list of my most lucrative pages. As I noted above, I can't afford to check all my pages, but I can afford to check those that are earning me money. I add the last months worth of new pages to that list to catch the early bird thieves.

The results

Once complete, you get a color coded list of possible plagiarized content. The color indicates the degree of severity so that you can prioritize your actions.

Unfortunately, I experience a lot of this. It has been a never ending battle for many years. Fortunately, many of these don't show up in high search result position, so if my page does and they do not, I can afford to push them down lower on my list while I spend my time chasing those who are actually in a position to cost me income.

I will get to the rest eventually, but if they aren't costing me money, I don't treat it as being quite as urgent. I am also less quick to go after those who have copied but gave me full credit and a link and those who have not put their ads up with my copied content. The ones I want to go after instantly are the outright thieves who are trying to pass my work off as their own.