What to Do if You Find Plagiarism Online
Finding plagiarism online can be enormously frustrating, but you have options. In some cases, you can just contact the site owner and ask for the content to be removed. In a number of cases, the site owner may not even realize it’s bad netiquette to post someone else’s article in full. However, in many other cases, plagiarism may be outright thievery. Here are the steps to take
1. Take a screenshot of the website.
2. Use a service like Domaintools.com to see who hosts the site and the site’s IP address.
3. Contact the site’s web host to see about having the site removed.
4. Contact Google to have the site removed from Google’s index. You want to do this with other search engines as well, if applicable.
If you’ve got a huge, high page rank site, your site can probably afford content being stolen – and going after every case of plagiarism can be time consuming. It’s the smaller sites that are trying scratch and claw to get attention online that can be most hurt by online plagiarism, so these website owners should be very watchful.
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