Three Tools To Track and Defeat Content Theft
As more and more blogs come into existence, an increasing number of scraper sites are created to grab our content with an intention to make some quick money. It is important to deal with online plagiarism by tracking and shutting down such scraper sites immediately so as to prevent them from getting high SERP positions. Here are three tools that might help:
Copyscape
You can call Copyscape a ‘content theft search engine’. All you have to do is go to the site and type in your blog’s URL, and it scours the internet for websites and blogs that have either stolen or quoted your blog’s content. You can then decide on further course of action by contacting the plagiarist or the web host. Copyscape also provides a premium account using which you can do unlimited searches, copy and paste a block of text to look for its copies on the web, etc.
Visit Copyscape
Fair Share
Most of blog content theft these days happens using automated RSS Feed scraping. You can go to Fair Share and type in your blog feed URL. Their engine searches for plagiarised content and provides you with an RSS feed that links to the scrapers’ sites, so that you can keep an eye on the plagiarists from your feed reader itself.
Visit Fair Share
Tracer
Tracer is a pretty aggressive way to track content theft and it works only after you install its gadget or code in your blog. It then tracks user activity just like an analytics program, looking for copy paste activities on your blog. When somebody copies your content and pastes it, the pasted text is automatically accompanied by a link to your blog. Have a look at the screenshot above for an instance where the pasted text is followed by the source link.
Visit Tracer
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I am using FairShare to good effect. i had previously used Tracer, it works fine no doubt, but slows down the page load since we need to have the java script.
Raju
16 Apr 09 at 1:37 pm
@Raju: I agree. Adding any kind of script to your blog does slow down the loading time.
Shankar Ganesh
16 Apr 09 at 1:39 pm
Copyscape and Fairshare seems like a good enough tool that can prove to be effective in combating online plagiarism, however, the last one, Tracer is counter-intuitive; at least from a usability point-of-view. When the culprit copy and paste the content, he could just easily remove the last addition (i.e. “read more at…” portion). In addition it just slows down the load times just like Raju indicated.
HagenOey
16 Apr 09 at 2:36 pm
[...] 3 tools to track and defeat content theft lists three tools available to counteract content theft from your blog. This has become even more of an issue of late with the economy in the lurch, more people are jumping on the blogging bandwagon looking to make some extra money and might not be aware of copyright and Intellectual Property laws. The last tool listed is Tynt Tracer and I have been uysing it for a while. Tracer tracks and lists all the browser actions performed by visitors such as selecting and copying text and then uses Javascript to add a small link back to the original content if it is pasted onto another webpage somewhere. This method of tracking information copying is not really very effective, especially in this automated world of scrapers. While the information provided is interesting, it turns out to be a little useless if your content is not ruled by the lure of SEO but by your desire to just write and disseminate information. I still find myself checking back with the Tynt admin interface once in a while to see which topics seem to be more Search Engine popular this week. [...]
Blogging and WordPress Links for 4/23/09 | Weblog Tools Collection
23 Apr 09 at 5:51 pm
Wow, I just used Copyscape and found 10 results. I guess that I will have to go all of them and see exactly what they copied and all.
Thanks for the links, this article has been very useful to me. I will check out Fair share and Tracer some other time, I have bookmarked them though.
George Serradinho
23 Apr 09 at 8:25 pm
Hi–
I’ve got a question about your comment, “shutting down such scraper sites immediately so as to prevent them from getting high SERP positions”
My blog posts have been scraped to many blogs in a very nonsensical way and I’ve never been able to figure out the motivation for doing so. You mention that they want to increase their SERP position, but I’m still not sure what that accomplishes, as many of these blogs don’t appear to be selling anything or have Google Adsense on them.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
Donna
Donna Gunter
23 Apr 09 at 8:44 pm
@George: You’re welcome. I’m glad this post helped you in some way
@Donna: Well, may be they automatically scrape a lot of sites, and yours might just happen to be one of them. Who knows, their purpose might be to just fill their site with as much content as possible.
Shankar Ganesh
23 Apr 09 at 8:49 pm
Not that my blogs are that great or that my content is that awesome, but it’s always nice to find out and catch copycats in action. But I’ve got this little question about the effectiveness and reliability of Tracer.
If I’m not mistaken, it’s not recommended to have “hidden” incoming links?
Kevin Paquet
24 Apr 09 at 2:34 am
[...] Three tools to track and defeat content theft – Bloggers should check out these three web apps [...]
Recap of April’s Tech Tips
27 Apr 09 at 3:15 pm
[...] 3 tools to track and defeat content theft lists three tools available to counteract content theft from your blog. This has become even more of an issue of late with the economy in the lurch, more people are jumping on the blogging bandwagon looking to make some extra money and might not be aware of copyright and Intellectual Property laws. The last tool listed is Tynt Tracer and I have been uysing it for a while. Tracer tracks and lists all the browser actions performed by visitors such as selecting and copying text and then uses Javascript to add a small link back to the original content if it is pasted onto another webpage somewhere. This method of tracking information copying is not really very effective, especially in this automated world of scrapers. While the information provided is interesting, it turns out to be a little useless if your content is not ruled by the lure of SEO but by your desire to just write and disseminate information. I still find myself checking back with the Tynt admin interface once in a while to see which topics seem to be more Search Engine popular this week. [...]
Blogging and WordPress Links for 4/23/09 | The Latest Headlines
7 May 09 at 3:48 am
[...] 3 tools to track and defeat content theft lists three tools available to counteract content theft from your blog. This has become even more of an issue of late with the economy in the lurch, more people are jumping on the blogging bandwagon looking to make some extra money and might not be aware of copyright and Intellectual Property laws. The last tool listed is Tynt Tracer and I have been uysing it for a while. Tracer tracks and lists all the browser actions performed by visitors such as selecting and copying text and then uses Javascript to add a small link back to the original content if it is pasted onto another webpage somewhere. This method of tracking information copying is not really very effective, especially in this automated world of scrapers. While the information provided is interesting, it turns out to be a little useless if your content is not ruled by the lure of SEO but by your desire to just write and disseminate information. I still find myself checking back with the Tynt admin interface once in a while to see which topics seem to be more Search Engine popular this week. 20 Law related questions every blogger should know: Jonathan Bailey puts together the answers to a list of 20 Law related questions for bloggers for the topics of Copyright, Defamation and Trademark. Again, this is for informational purposes only and is not to be considered as legal advice. This is also based on US Law. [...]
Blogging and WordPress Links for 4/23/09 - Word Press Magazine
14 May 09 at 7:03 am