Plaigarising Anew - Are Spammers Fooling Search Engines?

Plagiarism is not a new online phenomenon by any standard. In reality, the ease and the lack of established governance in curbing online content theft have in essence made this concept into a notoriety of sorts. The rise of spam sites, splogs, and mirror sites, which conveniently delve into its benefits to either enhance their site hits or their ad revenue or both, just goes to prove how widespread it really is.

In the online arena, no website is unassailable, and no security is absolute. It is little wonder then that this has led leading search engines to adopt strict criteria to weed out plagiarised content, thus protecting the original site reputation. This measure began with Google bringing down the search rankings and indexing of sites with duplicate content, thus slashing their exposure rates. And other search sites have followed in tandem too.

Foolproof Plagiarism? Almost...

So why is plagiarism now a new phenomenon? Nope, it certainly is as old as the web arena itself, but there is a catch. Indeed this is a fresh approach to scraping content off reputed sites, something every webmaster and online publisher would do well to heed. The concept of synonymized plagiarism has perhaps been touched often by many publishers. Any ardent SEO addict would grasp quite simply the fact that search engines are not immune to plagiarism in that they are tuned to identifying reasonably exact content lifting, but a more complex arrangement of words would miss its search 'spiders'. The use of synonyms to replace portions of the content will essentially make the text unique, and these would easily disentangle itself from being marked 'duplicate'. There are even auto-synonomizer software out there to make the task even simpler for the spammer. Innovative isn't it.

Newer Ways to Plagiarise

And then the plot gets thicker. Well, it actually began when some well know webmasters and bloggers caught on sites hosting content that seemed almost like their own, but something was not quite right. Well, it turns out these content were 'created' via 'double translation', using the available online translation tools to translate the text to another language and then back to the original one, English in most cases. The whole process is automated - screening for related content of interest to the site or splog, the translation itself, and then the publishing process. While the content essentially retains the same meaning it escapes any online check. And to their credit, some sites do track back to the original post, but several others would not be as courteous.

But is this method foolproof? Hardly. You see, any writer worth his salt will tell you that using automated translation software will generate output that is technically correct, but makes no linguistic sense. A re-translation is practically commercial suicide, and the final content is probably gibberish. But that doesn't really stop the spammers, who of course are not looking to educate their audience anyway!

How Do Publishers Cope

So, finally the verdict. How does one escape these ruthless content lifters? How do you really protect your site from plagiarists and scrapers? You could begin with copyrighting every word you publish online, regardless of how insignificant it may seem. 

You could set up plagiarism tools, such as Google alerts or Copyscape detection. Applying digital fingerprints to protect yourself from misuse of your RSS feeds is another point to ponder since RSS scraping appears to be a dance for spammers. This feature can be used along with Google alerts, or as a plugin, if you publish via Wordpress. There is no one answer, but every bit helps.

Publish in Peace

To conclude, the aim to safeguard oneself from plagiarism is to be able to publish without worrying about whether someone else will one day claim ownership of your content. Using your original writing with due sourcing and linking is acceptable, but a breach of copyrights shall be socked no less! So publish without restraint, but monitor incessantly.