Using Google Alerts to check for content theft
In my AdSense book I devote a small section to discussing plagiarism and copyrights, including a tip on regularly using Google to find sites who are copying your content without your consent. This is good advice, but you can also get Google to monitor the Web for you automatically using the Google Alerts tool.
It's very simple to setup. First of all, look through your text for what Amazon refers to as a “statistically improbably phrase”, or SIP for short. A SIP is a phrase whose wording is unlikely to appear in any other text. Now, you don't have access to the same kind of database that Amazon does to figure out if a phrase is a SIP or not, but you can do the next best thing by doing a Google search to see if it really is a SIP or not. (Remember to enclose the SIP in quotation marks, you want Google to search for the exact phrase, not just for the individual words in the phrase.)
Once you have your SIP or SIPs, go to the Google Alerts page and enter the phrase (in quotation marks) and select “Web” as your search type and then the desired frequency of the search as well as your email address. You'll get a verification email sent to you and once you've verified it a Google Alerts account will be created for you. Once the account is created, you can define more alerts — you're not limited to monitoring a single phrase. You can also have the alerts sent to you as plain text emails or as HTML emails — it's your choice.
Once you've registered your alerts, Google will send you periodic emails whenever the phrase shows up in its index, with links to the containing pages. All you do is look through those pages to see what they're about and if they've illegally copied any of your content.
It's not the only way to detect plagiarism, of course, and it won't detect all kinds of plagiarism, but it's so easy to setup that it's worth spending a few minutes doing.
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3 Responses to “Using Google Alerts to check for content theft”
[...] two years ago I wrote about using Google Alerts to find content theifs. It’s still incredibly useful for that. But there’s another reason to use Google [...]
[...] Other resources to protect yourself from splogging: Splogs: Spam Blogs and Stolen Content What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content Using Google Alerts to Check for Content Theft [...]
We used google alerts for this purpose, but needed a way to monitor all content on a page at once.
We think Copy Alerts may be an easier way to monitor the entire content of a web page by just entering your email address and the url to monitor.
There is also a WordPress plugin available:
http://blog.bitscan.com/2008/06/22/launch-of-copyalerts/