Plagiarism is the wrongful appropriation of someone else’s thoughts and ideas. It involves copying the text and re-publishing it as your own.

The plagiarism problem is as old as print itself, but with the Internet it gained a far greater scale, as now it takes literally seconds to copy the work of someone else. For instance, the Education Week newspaper conducted a survey that showed impressive results: 54% of students said they plagiarized from the Internet while doing homework. Also the survey presented other interesting data: 47% of questioned students were sure their teachers tend to ignore the fact students are cheating.

Not only that. Given the sense of anonymity that the web provides, many people think that the probability that they will be caught is minimal. Some even believe that whatever is found online is public domain, and therefore they feel free to copy and use any text as they wish.

If you are a website owner, this can be a problem. First of all, Google frowns upon duplicate content, so if your articles are appearing on dozens of other sites, your search rankings could suffer. Second, if visitors find the copy of your articles, they will have no reason to visit your site.

That is why it’s probably a good idea to check if you are not being plagiarized, at least once a week.

How do you do that? There are several online tools that can help. For instance, check out Unplag.com, which is a plagiarism detection engine. Once you upload a text there, it will scan over 16 billion web pages looking for copies or similar content. They are able to scan in such a huge scale because they have partnered with Google and Bing.

Unplag supports batch scanning of several files at the same time, and a report is provided for each document. They also have a nice affiliate program where you can earn from 15 to 30 percent commissions for every sale. What’s more, Unplag is currently testing a new WordPress plugin that will substantially make checking easier for bloggers. In response to user requests, Unplag is also working at new check methods – URL check and website check.

Regardless of the tool you choose, make sure you check your content for originality, since Copied content can hurt your brand reputation!

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