So you've assembled some thoughtfully written original content, how do you protect it from plagiarism? Or how do make certain that your article writing services or bloggers are delivering content that has not been poached from somewhere else? My Los Angeles website design blog often discusses the importance of publishing authentic and eye-catching writing on your blog and website and why it is an important element of your search engine optimization campaign, yet we haven't really touched on the fact that once content hits the internet, a great deal of it only stays unique for five minutes. That is, web plagiarism is more of a problem than many blog writers and business owners realize and it is important to safeguard against its ruining your reputation with both SERP's and prospective clients.

Unethical and lazy as it may be, stealing written content and using it as your own is as easy as copying and pasting. A university professor friend of mine was recently telling me how he could tell some of his students had stolen whole paragraphs off Wikipedia for their papers because they didn't even bother to take out the hyperlinks! Sadly, plagiarism remains alive and well in both the academic and business worlds, and it can harm how Google views your site because when it finds identical content it has trouble distinguishing which source was the first source to publish, and is most relevant to user searches. Search engines can quickly lump your site in with the other copycats. Whether you're inadvertently using duplicate content, or someone is stealing your own writing, you need a plagiarism detection tool like Copyscape.

There are tons of plagiarism detection programs that are geared towards improving SEO, but my team's tool of choice is this great site. Copyscape will search on whole articles and locate single phrases that match, and will even see through CSS that is sometimes used to obscure copied content. Several dozen searches cost mere pennies. Just paste in the text and hit Enter. When an article or any amount of text is found, duplicate content is highlighted and compared side by side. Additionally, Copyscape doesn't just tell you if something has been copied, it also has an advice section covering how to take appropriate action against it.