Searching for segments of text from the source article is one way to seek out copied content; however I often find that parts of the text or titles have been changed and other times only a small section of the text has been copied.

So, what’s an honest webmaster to do?

If you haven’t done so already it’s important to add appropriate notices to your site to set out your position regarding your content see: businesslink.gov.uk and creativecommons.org

In addition to the above there are two websites that I use in an attempt to eradicate plagiarism as much as possible. Copyscare.com which can help you track down the plagiarised content and Tynt.com which can help you monitor and possibly gain a link back from others copying your site content. The real plus, is that in their basic form, both of these sites are free to use.

Detecting Existing Plagiarism with Copyscape

Detecting Copied Content & Existing Plagiarism with Copyscape

Copyscape is simple to use, just copy and paste the URL of the page that you want to investigate into the Copyscape toolbar and click search. When you look down the results and click thru to the pages you will see that Copyscape scans not just the page title, but also reports back pages containing smaller portions of text that are identical to the original.

You can then deal with any issues that Copyscape highlights using the information found here: copyscape.com/respond.php

Monitoring & benefiting from Copied Content with Tynt Tracer

You will need to register to use the Tynt Tracer by visiting Tynt.com. The tracer works by providing you with a piece of code that you insert on any web page that you want to monitor, you will need to add the code just before the </body> tag.

Once the code is included anyone copying even a small portion of your page content will add a link back to your original page each time that they paste that content into a blog, another web page or even an e-mail (see screenshot below). The link can include the most appropriate Creative Commons License to help reinforce the point that you need credit for the content.

Copied Text Showing Tynt Tracer link with Creative Commons License

The resulting links can be great for the search engines (if posted on blogs or webpages) but more importantly they provide you with an appropriate credit for your hard work.
For a real world example of how the Tynt Tracer works see the following video: