Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Fair Share Detects Content Plagiarism via RSS Feeds

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/detect-rss-feed-plagiarism/7876/

Fair Share Detects Content Plagiarism via RSS Feeds

feed plagiarismContent theft via RSS feeds is probably the biggest challenge for bloggers and other web publishers. Most sites are now syndicating full text RSS feeds to keep their regular readers happy but this makes life easy for scrapers as well as they can automatically republish your article on to their own site without having to do anything.

How to Detect RSS Feed Plagiarism

Google is not always a good tool to detect RSS feed plagiarism as it may not be indexing these “scrap” sites too frequently and second, some of the sites may not exist in Google’s index at all as they are too young and so the “Sandbox effect” takes over.

plagiarism report

Now if you have a blog and are struggling to detect other sites that may be reusing content from your RSS feed without permission or attribution, try Fair Share - it’s a free web service that will help you discover other web pages on the Internet that are republishing a portion of your RSS content. And it works as advertised.

Related: How to Deal with Internet Plagiarism

How to use Fair Share

To use Fair Share, simply provide them the URL of your RSS feed and wait for a few hours while the Fair Share bots scour the web for possible violations.

You’ll get all the results in a personalized RSS feed that will not just inform you about sites taking your content but also the extent and whether that size in monetizing your content through ads.

rss feed of plagiarism

Not all feeds in the Fair Share report may be instances of plagiarism as some sites genuinely use excerpts and link to the original story (e.g, Alltop) but it’s still a must-have service for bloggers.

And here’s another screenshot from the Fair Share report. It highlights content on other web pages that may have been lifted from your RSS feed.

copied content highlighted

If you are syndicating content though RSS feeds under a Creative Commons License, the Fair Share service will also help you detect if the other site is respecting that license or not through attribution (or linking to the original article). Thanks Arpit for the tip.

Fair Share for Websites without RSS Feeds

If you have a small website and need to check for instances of plagiarism in the blog world, use Google Reader to create a RSS feed of your website and pass on the Google feed address to Fair Share.

You cannot prevent websites or blogs from republishing your content but you can always file a DMCA complaint with their web hosts.

Fair Share Detects Content Plagiarism via RSS Feeds (Published at Digital Inspiration)