I want to show a website that I think is helpful for online marketing. It’s a website called Copyscape, and it checks your website and scans the internet for plagiarism.
Plagiarism could be people that copied your work, or it could be if your internet marketing company copied somebody else’s website. Another example of plagiarism is if you’re like a client that we have who used to have FindLaw, they would take the same website content and use it across all of their FindLaw websites.
How To Use Copyscape
I’m going to show you how we check for plagiarized content, and I want to show you some examples of where plagiarism occurs. We use this website called Copyscape, which is cheap. You have to buy credits, and I believe its five cents per search.
What you need to do is go to Copyscape and log in. I think there’s also a free version where you can search, and I believe the free search will pull up copies, but I recommend you spend the minimum which is $10 on PayPal.
For my company, we use the premium search. So, here’s an example. Dixon and Pope, P.A. is in Kansas City and they were one of the websites that we’ve found that our client had a lot of duplicate content from their website. When I ran Dixon and Pope’s website through Copyscape, I found that there’s a lot of other websites that have content that matches theirs. So, I want to show you what that looks like.
If you’re going to run a batch search, what’s cool about this is you enter your website URL, and it will populate everything. What you’re going to do is go to premium and then, batch search. You add all the URLs you want to search and then after the search is done, Copyscape is going to go and look at every link on this page and find all the other pages on your website. Once it’s finished, you end up with a detailed report.
This report will have every URL on the website and how many matches on the internet were found of content on this URL. Green is the best and the higher word count percentage that’s found, the darker red it gets.
Why Is Duplicate Content A Problem?
If we look at this report, there’s lots of duplicate content. Why is duplicate content a problem? There’s an algorithm that Google uses called the Panda algorithm. The Panda algorithm examines the overall quality of your website and the quality of the content of your website. So, if you have pages that have a lot of duplicate content, that can hurt your Panda score.
The problem with the Panda score is that it is part of the live Google algorithm and part of your rankings, which could cause some issues there. You won’t necessarily get a penalty, but the problem is that Google doesn’t necessarily want to show two of the same pieces of content.
If I click on the slip and fall page, the same content is found on other pages, with some of that same content found on davidamallesq.com, then tedlion.com, helmslaw.com, and libbylaw.com
What will happen is Google will not necessarily show all of these on the search results. You won’t get as much visibility because Google thinks there are other pages out there that have this exact content. Why would we show the same content multiple times?
We’re going to look at davidamallesquire.com, and what’s nice about Copyscape is you can see the page below has 262 words matching 33% of the page as highlighted below. Everything that’s highlighted is duplicated. So, let’s see source page.
Just look at the first sentence here, “Property owners have a duty to properly manage, supervise and operate their property to minimize unnecessary risk of harm to others.” Now, let’s go back to the found page. “Property owners have a duty to properly managed, supervise, operate their property.” It’s the exact same thing. This is a problem, and I’ve seen this with FindLaw websites over and over again.
As you get further down the list, there’s less plagiarized content, but it can be copywriters that are working for the same company, that are just basically recycling content. It can be people that just copy your website. It can be bots that are scraping your website. There’s a lot of different ways that this can happen. So, I want to make people aware of this, especially if you have a FindLaw website.
Hopefully, this has shed some light on the topic of plagiarism for you. Take a look at Copyscape, run your page through Copyscape, and let me know if you find any duplicate content.
