The internet – the most efficient place to search for information – and you have taken advantage of it to spread your knowledge to people around the world to those who need it. You took the effort to passionately write an article that you really think would provide value to people, and it took up one hour of your precious time; which you could have used to do something that you really enjoyed.

Then, the worst happens. You found your article on another website that isn’t related to you in any way and your name is nowhere to be found. At the end of the article, you see a name which isn’t yours – it has been credited to someone other than you. You search Google using the keyword you wrote the article for and his article ranks higher than yours – the search engine spiders crawled the thief’s frequently updated website before they crawled yours.

Your efforts are wasted.

Plagiarism on the internet is widespread; one reason being that is extremely simple to do and another, because of the number of dishonest people that have exploited the internet’s capabilities. It’s ironic, that the very tool that allows people to express themselves in ways not possible before is also allowing others to more easily take advantage of these people.

Plagiarism cannot be completely prevented, but there are ways you can reduce the occurrence of it happening to you, or reversing its effects. We will talk about a few of the measures you can take here and what you can do if it does happen.

Prevention measures you can take:

The most effective way there is to prevent plagiarism from happening at all is to emphasize and warn anyone visiting your website that the content is yours and letting them know that they cannot copy it. The alternate way which would work better is turning your writings into images, but that also results in the search engines being unable to read your content and it will not be listed in the search results.

Placing a Copyright Notice on Your Blog

At the footer of your blog, add a copyright statement to assert that you own the content written on all the pages of your website. It should look something like this “Copyright © [Your Name or Company Here]. All rights reserved”.

Place a Copyscape Banner on Your Blog

Place this at a visible spot on your blog, preferably above the fold. The thieves most probably know Copyscape, a tool that allows you to find plagiarised content, and avoid copying your website because if you do know about this tool, you can find them and cause them trouble.

What if you used Copyscape and found your website copied by someone else?

Here are some actions you can take to try and get the content off their website:

Find out their e-mail and send them a request/warning

Search the website that the article is listed in for the e-mail address of the owner, and send that person an e-mail asking for the content to be removed politely. If you cannot find it there, use a whois to find the contact details of the webmaster.

Call them by Phone

Use a whois service to find out the phone number of the person and call him or her. A phone call to the thief in person should scare him enough to remove it. The person who gets the call will be afraid, knowing that you could possibly trace the phone number to his address and maybe do something to his lawn.

Contact the Web Host of the Thief’s Website

Again, a whois search should reveal the web hosting provider of the website. If you cannot find it, look at the name servers that should look something like “ns1.webhostname.com” and replace the ns1 with www to get the address of the web host. Send an e-mail to the company telling them about the customer’s misdoings and hope that they warn the thief with a threat to cancel his hosting account. If they use a good host, this will probably be settled. If not…

File a Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the Search Engines

This will inform the search engines about the thief and get him removed from the search results. You can consider this to be the most vengeful move of all, since it may even ruin the whole website if it depends a lot on search engine traffic.

Plagiarism may be something you cannot prevent, but you can definitely do things to prevent it from becoming too serious.

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