Is Your stuff being Nicked?

A Very Quick Note About Plagiarism.

I was going to write about the basics of article writing.

You know by now that its important to have regular fresh and original content on your website. It benefits your Google Rankings, attracts inbound links, boosts customer loyalty and generally adds credibility to your site.

But I stopped because I realised that a lot of people don't even know that their stuff may well be nicked from their website.

But worse than that, if someone else takes your content and copies it blatantly on their website, then it can actually harm your Google rankings because you may be penalised by Google for "duplicate content".

The upshot? It's important to check if your content is getting ripped off.

Conversely, it goes without saying that you should never copy content without getting permission and crediting the author.

Getting sued for breach of copyright is becoming increasingly commonplace and very likely a simple "cease and desist" order won't be enough anymore to placate the aggrieved party.

How to Check?

Of course, a quicky and dirty way of doing it is to highlight/select some random text on your site (which you believe is unique to you) and then paste it into Google's search bar.

Put a "double quote" on either side of the text to force the search to yield only 'exact' matches and if any are returned, they should only come from your website...

This can get a bit repetitive and of course you have to remember to do it regularly.

The scary thing is when you have other people writing content for you.

Staff, outsourced content writers or even your web designer. It's important to make sure that you're not copying anyone and that no-one is copying you.

I wrote my own php script to automate this (with a cron job) but if you're not comfortable doing that then something like Copyscape would probably be a good investment (http://www.copyscape.com/ )to free up your time and put your mind at rest.

More in depth stuff about article writing soon...

If you would like some training with your internet marketing, please visit http://www.mklink.com/getstarted today.

'till next time,

Mike Knight. MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips