Make Money from Blogs » Detect

Detecting plagiarism on your WordPress blog – using the Tracer tool

ashish — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:09:36 +0000

The previous post talked about using this tool if you have a Blog hosted on Google’s Blogger, but what if you have a WordPress account ? Well, this tool works for blogs running on WordPress, and numerous others (Ning network, Typepad, WebsiteWorks.com). It is fairly easy to add this to your WordPress blog, since WordPress has a plugin structure that easily allows the addition of more functionality. You can refer the following site (link) for installation instructions. Basically, this functionality requires adding code to the template, and just before the tag.
So, go for it. The code is setup to add a small link back to your site when they copy your content so that when they add the content to their site, the link gets added. This link will eventually get caught and you can then detect that your content is being coped elsewhere, and then you can take further action to remove the stolen content.

Protect your Blogger post – Use Tracer to add your own link back to the copied content

ashish — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:56:18 +0000

It remains difficult to protect your content. You can take measures such as adding a Javascript that will prevent people from being able to right-click, or which will prevent people from being able to select content from your blog, but there are ways around that. Such controls do prevent some people from being able to take your content, but there will be people who are more technologically competent, and they will be able to beat your controls.
The method to be used is to detect when somebody is stealing your content, and then confront that person. The main point in this approach is to find out when somebody is stealing your content through the use of tools such as Google Alert, through some smart searching through using Google, and through some other plugins. However, if you have a blog on Google’s Blogger interface, it will get more difficult to use such measures. One such tool however that you can use is called Tracer, and can be downloaded from this link.
The way that this tool works is that you can set it up on your Blogger blog through a HTML/Javascript gadget, and then the tool will add a back link to your site when somebody selects content from your site and copies it. There will be always some people who will notice the back link, but for those where a tool is used to copy, or when somebody is not careful enough, the back link will let you easily detect when somebody has copied content from your site.

Protect your content: Report a spam blog to Google

ashish — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:05:58 +0000

The Google Search service provides a huge percentage of traffic to most sites, especially those of individuals. The position of a site in the Google search index is a big variable in the success or failure of a site, and the removal of a site from the Google index can reduce a site (especially spam blogs) to becoming almost useless. And this is one of the approaches you should take if a site is stealing your content. Again, as I have repeated earlier, it is almost impossible to really protect your content from being stolen, and what you should concentrate on is how to close down those sections of another site where your content is being used.
The Google site to report stolen content being hosted on another site is at this link. From the site:

Help us to make Blogger and Blog*Spot spam-free by reporting spam blogs below. Please submit each blog only once. While we don’t reply to individual reports, we will review every submission as soon as possible and take action as necessary.

Detect Plagiarism: Use CopyGator.com

ashish — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:15:53 +0000

Nobody likes it when they find that their content, hard written content has been copied by another site. However, the fact is, if your site is on the internet, then it can and will be copied, and it is difficult to stop this from happening. Where you get more involved is when you define a process for what to do, with the elements of this process being:
- Find out whether you are being copied
- Send warning letters to whoever is copying you to stop their stealing your content
- Escalating the process, including sending this information to their hosting service, to Google Adsense, and sending cease letters under the DMCA
The first important step is to detect that your content is being copied, and there are numerous tools for the same purpose. Here is one.
CopyGator (site link) is a site that detects copies of your blog / contents.
From the site:

This is a free service designed to monitor your RSS feed and find where your content has been republished in the blogosphere. We automatically notify you when a new post of yours is copied to another feed, we also build an overview page you can view to see how/when/where your content is being duplicated, quoted or plagiarized.

Stop Plagiarism: Add backlinks to your content feed

ashish — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:06:09 +0000

RSS feeds give a very easy to get your content up on other sites. Not a very good thing, given that a person looking to get some quick (and steal some content written after a lot of effort) content up on their site would just need to subscribe to your content, and then use this feed (through a plugin) to get this content up on their site. It is very easy to setup a plugin that will take this content from a RSS feed, and automatically get this content up on their site.
Now, there are many reasons as to why you want to not restrict your RSS feed to provide only a summary. If you do restrict your RSS feed to only have a short summary, then it will help in your battle against people who are copying your content, but think of the other implications on your regular readers. There are people who prefer to read content directly through their RSS readers, and you need to evaluate whether you want to cater to this group. However, many such readers are an important part of spreading the content of your blog, given that they spread such links to other people if they like the content. Further, you can place ads in these feeds and hope to make some money from these once you have enough people reading your feeds.
One way in which you can detect that such a problem exists is by adding a few backlinks in your RSS feed. People who manually copy the content can in some cases figure out that backlinks exist, and manually remove these links. Automated solutions have a very high probability of not determining these backlinks. The advantage of backlinks is that you will get a trackback onto your blog that will point to the copy blog. (Keep in mind that you will not derive any Page Rank benefit from these backlinks, as the other blog may not be in high standing with Google).