The Internet Knows When You Plagiarize

July 15, 2010 - Ever since the written word was established, plagiarism has been an ongoing battle, especially when writers learned their works could be sold for profit. The idea of copyrighting came into play and suddenly there was legal recourse for protecting your written word...for the most part.

The increase in popularity of the Internet as a medium for distributing written works, from novels to blog posts, has also created a dramatic increase in plagiarism of these works. Word processing technology makes it far too easy to copy and paste content from a previously written work into your own text document, blog software, or whatever you use to create your words.

Luckily, as the technology to copy the works of others evolves, so does the technology to catch it. In schools, where writing assignments are abundant, many teachers are using websites like Turnitin.com to check their students' papers against thousands of others submitted to their database. The website's algorithms and content database are constantly growing, allowing teachers to curtail plagiarism in the classroom.

But what about the corporate side of things? Many websites hire outside journalists and writers to provide them with content for their pages. That's our job at We Do Web Content; providing custom original written content to our clients. Companies like ours employ multiple writers to help produce content, and with so many pieces going through our pipelines, it's no easy task to ensure that our work is original.  

At We Do Web Content, we utilize a service called CopyScape that checks each piece of our content through a rigorous scan of millions of other works, everything from professionally published books to article sites and blogs across the Internet. The scan returns our editors a percentile of compatibility and shows the exact words that match and the article or source they match to. This is the first step in our multi-pronged editing process.

If a piece of content was shown to be too close to another source, even with a small percentile, it would be sent back to the writer (i.e. if the issue was minor, and related to facts, statistics, disease symptoms, laws or statutes that may be difficult to reword on one's own) for revision or proper attribution, followed by a re-scan.  If a writer is found to have plagiarized, they would no longer be on our roster of writers. This is how we can assure you that the content on your website is unique.

(P.S. Our editors even ran this blog through Copyscape; that's how seriously we take the issue!)

When your business is looking for quality, custom content for your website, newsletters, and social media look no further than We Do Web Content. Having unique content on your website is a great way to increase search engine rankings and boost your Internet marketing. For affordable, quality content exclusive to YOUR website, blog and clients, contact us today!  1-888-521-3880.