Copyscape Searches For Scraped Content

Having your content stolen or scraped for search engine purposes can lead to duplicate content penalties that can result in search engine index removal. Conversly, while your site may escape being punished, the fact that someone else stole your hard work and is presenting it as original content cannot be a pleasing discovery. Because screen scraping is one of the Copyscape.com, a site that searches for content that is identical to yours. In order to make Copyscape work, enter the URL you are concerned about into Copyscape's search box and press the "Go" button. Copyscape will then spider it's database, which is refreshed often, for duplicate content matching the queried URL. For example purposes, I conducted a search using the murdok URL as the documents to be tested, although because the way Copyscape constructs their result page URLs (they only contain the Copyscape.com address) I can't link to the results of the murdok query. I can however tell you that local-internet-marketing.otherxy.com.ru (This mess goes on for some timeAs you can see from that gibberish, the webmaster of local-internet-whateveryoursite'snameis.ru is actively scraping the murdok content (visible dates in the above mess are 8-30-2005). Apparently, this scraper sites like to keep its stolen content as fresh as ours. As for Copyscape, once you find which sites are duplicating your content, Copyscape gives the user some options. The first ones allow the user to either, visit the page who has stolen the content, see the site's whois information, see the text on your site, and a link that allows you to respond to web plagiarism. You can also add Erin Bradley and the SearchViews blog. Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for latest search news.