Unique content in your blog

I think I wrote about it in half the pages on this site (or else should have done): create your own content, be unique!

A regular internet user doesn't likely visit one site to gather information on a topicin fact, they may be just like you. Startup Google, select some 5 of out the first 10 (especially if there's some site they already know) and read.
I think one of the most damaging things is, if the user sees the same content on different blogs.
Now I'm not talking about stock market share prices. This is about whole articles that are simply stolen from or maybe by you.

Copyscape

Some weeks ago I ran into a tool called Copyscape. It's been out there for a while of course, but I thought I'd best share it with you.
If you value your content, this is a great tool to see whether the content of your website is used elsewhere. That may not only be quite unethical. Looking at it from an SEO perspective, if your content is on other websites that pose a threat to your search engine ranking and traffic building efforts. Search engines have filters to check if the content of a page is original. If not, the site is less interesting (just as in real life).

Copyscape checks the web to find copies of your site and give you, if any, gives you the location of the copies. The first few are free. But that's not all. If you get a hit, you can look at the percentage of copied content and you get a nice view of what's been copied. Here's an example of a page I ran into:

Now of course, I did some checking on a few of my own Adsense related pages as well and discovered this:

To my surprise I got a hit on content I thought I wrote myself. After the initial shock I was looking a bit deeper and noticed the copied piece to be the Google PageRank formula.
It's true, I copied a few lines from the Google founders trying to explain what PageRank is all about. And I wasn't the only one...

Anyway: I really like this little tool.

Last Updated on Sunday, 29 August 2010 10:14