Plagiarism is a huge problem online and there is no sure fire way to prevent the content of your website from being ‘Scraped’ by unscrupulous web designers.

The fact of the matter is that search engines (especially Google) only want one instance of a news story at the top of their results pages. It would not be useful for Googles users to search for ‘web design in Essex’ and have the same news article appear from multiple sites. So Google takes steps to establish which of the sites was the original publisher of the content and drops the rest out of the top search results.

For this reason many of the sites that harvest copy from their competitors and other sites in their industry are not benefiting from the content. Their lazy efforts are recognised by search engines as duplicated content and no credit is given for the content as well as jeopardising their 'TrustRank'.

Despite the Search Engines best efforts plagiarism is still a great frustration to those web designers that painstakingly create useful content for their users only to have it stolen. What’s more if unique content is critical to your revenue generation website owners may often be taking a hit in their earnings.

So how do you prevent these blatant, sloppy jokers from stealing your hard work? Well as I mentioned above, you can’t. But I can offer some advice to help prevent it and what to do when it does happen.

See Part 2