You all probably know how important are inbound links to your website, in order to climb the google SERP and place your website in the top positions of search engines. I guess you all know how to get inbound links to your website, creating link building campaigns and getting spontaneous links from other websites. How? With good content, directory, article marketing, guest post, social network shares, social bookmarking, forums, blog comments etc... However, though more often webmasters forget to control their own websites, and it happens more and more frequently that the content posted by you being stolen by others, and maybe even linked by disreputable sites or even banned websites from the search engines, which can seriously affect your ranking in the SERPs. So is sometimes good to check the contents of your website, such as ensuring that the contents have not been stolen and copied on others websites, and it's nice to control that the links that point to your website come only from authoritative and reliable sites. I use the following tools online to check that the contents of my website have not been copied: -Google (do a simple search with short phrases taken from my post) -Copyscape To check the inbound links to my website I use these tools: -Ahrefs.com -Google webmaster tool If you found out some links from banned or spammy websites that point to your website, you now know that they can compromising the placement of your website, so you need to contact the webmaster of the site asking for the removal of the link. If the webmaster does not respond or can not get in touch, send an email to the hosting company to request removal of the link. If necessary, you can also report to google the presence of content copied or bad links. Believe me this small procedure can 'really help you get in the SERPs. I hope you enjoyed this easy tutorial! If you need help or have questions I will glad to help you. Thanks
Completely wrong. It does not affect your website. Google did crawl your content before they crawled the content copy of the thief. The algo can notice original content. Apart from that it is unlikely that your whole websites gets duplicated by another person and if so this person might be affected but not you. The topic about duplicated content is completely overrated you can find out in some sentences of Matt Cutts:
I don't think Matt Cutts is God... And sometimes I think he don't tell the (full) truth. That is my opinion, based on my experience, feel free to make your consideration. It's your choice.