Freelance Writing – How to Battle Plagiarism
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Detect Plagiarism With CopyScape
Unfortunately, plagiarism can be fairly wide-spread on the Internet. After you have been freelance writing for a bit, you need to sporadically check your content to make sure that anyone else using it is doing so in an approved, syndicated manner. You’ll likely come across everything from direct copy->paste violations to RSS “Scrapers” who repost your content from your RSS feed with no attribution. Now, you don’t want to go “AP Style” and try to make your content unusable by others on the web, but there are measures that you can take to 1 – Find folks using your content inappropriately, and 2 – To force proper attribution of both yourself and your site.
How to Detect Plagiarized Copies of Your Work Using CopyScape
Although it is not perfect, CopyScape is the most-widely accepted tool for checking against plagiarism and verifying original content on the market. There are a number of other plagiarism detection tools available if you hunt around, but CopyScape is easy to use and fairly effective. The free version of CopyScape allows you to conduct three free checks a month on a website uniform resource locator (URL), and displays all results that match your content on the CopyScape website. If you are creating content that you need to validate as being authentic, its worth paying for the premium, Copyscape service which costs $.05 USD a lookup. The premium service allows you to paste text into a blank field from your article and check for matches on-line. A pretty useful tool if you are producing content for a new client who asks you to validate authenticity.
How to Combat RSS Scrapers
A RSS Scraper is someone who re-posts content from blog or website RSS feeds to their site without providing proper attribution to the author or publishing website. When you run across a site that is scraping your content in this manner, there are typically two ways you can combat the issue: 1 – Is to hijack the RSS feed but redirecting the scraper’s IP address to a fake feed to muck up their site. Now, if you’re not a big-time computer guy or gal this may be a bit painful for you to do, so #2 is use the scraper as your own advertiser. To manually do this, you will want to do a few things with your blog posts:
1 – Copy and Paste the permalink and Title of the article into all blog posts so you automatically get a backlink from the scraper.
2 – Include other blog and affiliate links at the bottom of your blog posts (the Scraper in essence advertises these for you!)
3 – Use releated post plugins that list your related posts in your full RSS feed. The “Yet Another Related Post” plugin for WordPress does this for you as well as many of the other “Related Post” plugins that you will find through the WordPress archives.
4 – Invite the reader to subscribe to your RSS fee at the bottom of every post as well and list your site and full name. Most scrapers will be using automated tools and not go through the motions to remove the end of post information that you include.
Using these 4 simple steps will help you convert RSS feed scrapers into free advertisers for your blog or website! Now, if you have found other cases of outright plagiarism, you may want to check out the resources at CopyScape.com to get tips on combating copiers!
