How to Find and Remove Stolen Content

Suppose you are working on a blog, preparing website content, or managing a content writing business. In that case, you might have gotten your work stolen or plagiarized at least once. Stolen content, also known as plagiarism, refers to the reposting of similar content on other blogs, websites, magazines, or even assignments without proper citation, referencing, and attributions. Sometimes your work would be stolen deliberately by another publisher. Sometimes, you can also fall prey to cases of accidental plagiarism.

Now, this is surely a big problem for your credibility and the reputation of your site. The good news is that no matter how big or small the problem of plagiarism/stolen content is, there are different measures that you can take to find and remove it.

Today in this post, we will tell you about the multiple and common methods used to get rid of duplicate content.

How to find and remove stolen content?

If you are interested in finding stolen content and removing it immediately, you should read on the multiple ways stated in this brief section.

Step 1: Finding stolen content!

Google Alerts

There are hundreds of web tools that can help you determine whether your content is being used on another source without your authorization. Still, you should know that one of the best and simplest tools in this league belongs to Google. Google Alerts is a website source that you can open and use on any of your devices having a browser on them. On the website, you will see a text box in which you have to enter a portion of your article that you think is being stolen or misused. After entering the text, you also have to provide information about the type of websites you want to check. After completing the input information, you have to provide your email address to Google to contact you with the results. You can easily set daily, weekly, or even monthly alerts with this tool.

Duplichecker

Duplichecker is another utility website that has expertise in finding plagiarism/duplicate content. Plagiarism is a big menace for content writers, and if you want to get rid of it; we would suggest you try Duplichecker. You have to open this Plagiarism checker website on your browser and complete the input spaces. This online plagiarism checker website allows you to conduct a thorough search on raw text, complete document files, and websites. You have to enter the input data and click the ‘check plagiarism’ button. This free plagiarism checker tool hardly takes a few seconds to scan your text and find stolen content on other sites. The reports produced by this plagiarism checker are very much detailed and accurate. You can make as many scans as you want with Duplichecker’s plagiarism checker tool.

Step 2: Removing Stolen Content

Now that you have found the content that the online plagiarism checker tools have stolen, you remove it. If plagiarized content is not removed; it will cause a lot of trouble for the original website and its owner. So if you don’t want to lose your ranking position, credibility, and audience’s trust, you should immediately remove plagiarism.

Hunt for the hosting site

When you use the online plagiarism checker tools, they would tell you about the percentage of stolen content and the URL of the sites having similar content. Now you have to find out the host of the site having your stolen content. Finding the hosting site is easy once you open the culprit URL. You can contact them and complain about your content being stolen. In most cases, the hosting site would remove the entire web page or site with duplicated content without authorization. This might take two to three working days.

Use the Google webmaster tools

Google offers tons of helpful tools for web admins; you can easily use these digital portals to file a complaint about stolen content. The Google webmasters tool would help you file a complaint based on the digital millennium copyright act. Using this portal is complex, but you should surely get its help if the accused website is getting a higher ranking position because of your content. This is one of the most professional and reliable ways of getting stolen content removed.

Step 3: Stop this from happening again

After finding and removing the stolen content, you must also make sure that this practice doesn’t happen again. You should know that there is no such 100% foolproof way that can protect your content from being stolen; but yes, you can surely reduce the odds of it. You can create and add a formal copyright notice and terms & conditions regarding the use of the page. This notice would help people know that your content is protected with copyrights and can only be used with explicit permission from the owner or writer!