Most content buyers use a site such as copyscape.com to check if the articles they have are original, or copied from elsewhere. If you want to check if your own articles are being used/abused elsewhere online, copy and paste a piece of it into Google and see if it comes up - if it does, check out the page where it appears to see if indeed it is your writing. It's probably not 100% accurate as Google sometimes takes its time to list things, plus you're probably going to spend a lot of time going through things that aren't yours but if plagiarism troubles you, then you can decide if it's worth paying copyscape to do within seconds what it could take you some time to find with Google. Hope that helps. OceanWolf
Just set up alerts with Yahoo and Google for highly specific phrases in your article that wouldn't likely get deleted or altered much. Much easier than searching manually.
Just follow the instructions here: http://www.google.com/alerts and here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/alerts/about/alerts-18.html
Why should you worry about this? The internet is filled with rubbish. You articles tend to be brilliant if they are usually copied...Give me to read one of them...
People stealing your articles isn't a compliment because they're "brilliant." It's just the result of lazy-ass folks trying to earn money off your back... and they can do real damage to your own business as well (for example, I had several of my articles de-indexed on a blog of mine when I changed the domain name, b/c then the spammer who stole them looked like the "original" source compared to the new domain - getting them de-indexed prevents things like that and keeps your own business options open).
Content is being stolen, rewritten, passed around as original, etc. etc. etc. Establish yourself as the authority - Strive for quality content - Keep Pressing on. It's the nature of the business we're all in with IM. Until people start getting prosecuted or fined or banned from their ISP we'll continue to fight the battle of stolen & duplicate content. Just my 2 cents... Jeff
I had someone steal an article of mine and put it in a print magazine thousands of miles away. I contacted the editor to let her know that her writer was using my work. It was straightened out, apologies delivered and monitoring promised, but the whole episode made me wonder how many times it happens and is never detected.
You can also place hyperlinks to your domain inside your articles and set up alerts for links to your sites. Since many content thieves are too lazy to take out the links you can often catch them this way.
Agree with setting up alerts but I would go with the most commonly used trick among web developers. They track scripts by adding to their code a unique identifier. When it comes to articles we could says a unique term, let's say "Supercalifragilistic expialidocious" Of course you need to be ingenious enough crafting words, a combination of them or inventing an idomatic expression for such a trick. Beware however of the result since articles must make sense despite any tracking addition.