A crowded marketplace can lead to unethical webmasters using underhand techniques to get ahead of their competitors and online plagiarism is one of
easiest.I had worked hard on
copy for my sales page at Watch Live Football (http://www.watchlivefootball.com), ensuring
copy was relevant to potential customers and contained keyword rich phrases to assist with search engine ranking. Understandably, I was incensed when I found not one, but two websites selling a similar service had not just pinched a few key phrases here and there from my website, but had reproduced
entire text verbatim!
I found these offending websites by using Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com) which is an invaluable, free tool, in
battle against online plagiarism.
It highlighted that my competitors had stolen 254 words from my sales copy despite there being a clear copyright logo at
foot of each page of my website. However, this alone does not prevent an unscrupulous webmaster and CTRL & C command in full flow.
Fortunately, dealing with plagiarism on
internet can be a straightforward process and incidents resolved quickly and amicably before any real ‘action’ needs to be taken.
This is how I ensured my sales copy was removed from
two offending websites in less than 24 hours of discovery.
Write a polite, but firm email to
webmaster of
offending website and explain that you have found your copyrighted work has been illegally reproduced on it. If you have used Copyscape to detect plagiarism you could even include
link that highlights
illegally used copy and states an actual word count.