Fridays with Vicky 94
When you outsource content it’s important to make sure the content is unique. Before you know the writer before you’ve been working together for a while, you want to make sure that the content delivered is well written and not copied directly from the internet.
If you have too much of copied content on your site, you will have a difficult time ranking it in Google and other search engines.
Update: There seem so be some confusion around duplicate content and rankings in Google.
According to Google themselves, they will not penalize a site with duplicate content BUT they might not (most likely not) rank the content. Using duplicate content will not benefit your site when it comes to rankings.
If you pay for content and build your site around organic listings you want your content to rank. That’s why you want to make sure it’s unique and original so that it ranks in Google and other search engines.
When you’ve been working together for a while, you get to know the writing style of your writer and you can detect if the content is written by the writer or somebody else.
Let me give you an example:
Last month I was in for a “surprise”, I had been working with this great writer for a year. She was a field expert and always delivered well-written content every Tuesday, as agreed. As usual, I was expecting the articles on Tuesday but she delivered the articles much later in the week and they were poorly written. With a quick Google search and a free copyscape tool, I found out that the delivered content was pretty much copied from another article.
She denied that she had outsourced on her end, which disappointed me cause I could clearly see the difference in the writing style and language. Outsourcing from the writers is a big NO for me, and I make that very clear when I hire my writers. I hire the specific writer because I like their writing, not for them to turn around and outsource the content. Believe it or not, this is a lot more common than you might think.
To make a long story short, she had to rewrite the articles, and she is no longer writing for me.
My point is, make sure that your outsourced content is unique and well written, not only in the beginning of a job but also when your gut tells you too. Do a duplicate content check on occasion even though you have been working together for a long time.
You might have heard of CopyScape, a great tool to check plagiarism. Many ask if there are any free options to this premium tool. There is, let’s look at some Free Plagiarism Checker Tools to Use Instead of CopyScape.
But first, you want to double check the content you have on your site already, just to be on the safe side. Our top choice can help you with that.
Use #1 Siteliner to double check what has been submitted to your site already and #2 Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker to check new content that will be submitted.
5 Free Plagiarism Checker Tools to Use Instead of CopyScape
1. Siteliner – Will Check Your Site for Duplicate Content
If you are worried that you might have some duplicate content on your site, using a tool like Siteliner can be a great way to double check.
Submit your URL and the tool will do the rest. It will reveal duplicate content but so much more than just that…
Here are a few things that I found helpful, that Siteliner will analyze for your site:
- Duplicate content
- Broken links
- Average page load time
- Number of words per page
- Internal links per page
- External links per page
- Inbound links per page
Siteliner is a great tool to double check that your site is not built on too much duplicate content.
How to Check Individual Content Pieces
After the site is checked you can move on to check individual pieces of content. Maybe content that’s been outsourced.
To check the rest of the plagiarism tools out, I submitted three pieces of content, all duplicate content. The content pieces were:
- Content from a well-known health site.
- Content from itsVicky.com.
- Content from a membership site, Wealthy Affiliate.
Let’s see if the following Free Plagiarism Checker Tools recognize the content as duplicate.
2. Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker
The Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker, is a great tool that I prefer to use and can highly recommend. You copy and paste the text that you want to check for duplicate content into a text box.
You enter a security code and click “check plagiarism”. That’s it, the tool will do the rest.
With the 3 test articles shown above the Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker, detected all three as plagiarism.
What I like about the tool is that it will show exactly the text that’s duplicate, along with the text that’s original.
This tool allows unlimited searches.
3. Solid SEO Tools
Solid SEO Tools, is another good option that detected all three text snippets as duplicate content. It works similar to the Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker, you paste in the content in one of the text sections and click submit. They have a section for Essay, Website Link and Article / Content. You then allow the tool to do the job.
4. Duplichecker
Duplichecker will detect if there are other sites using the same content. It works similar to the other options in the way that you submit the content and click “check plagiarism”. It will not show sentence by sentence but a link to the website where the duplicate content is detected.
With Duplichecker you have one free search, after that, you have to sign up for a free account.
5. Quetext.com
Quetext is a tool that I would stay away from, it didn’t recognize any of the content as duplicate. It showed the result of 100% unique when it was completely false and all duplicate content.
Not a tool I would use or recommend.
Final Thoughts
My recommendation is to use Siteliner to do a check on your overall site. Then use Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker to double check the new content that might be outsourced.
Hope you found this article, 5 Free Plagiarism Checker Tools to Use Instead of CopyScape, helpful. I would love to hear from you, what’s your choice when it comes to checking duplicate content, do you use CopyScape or another tool? Share with us below!
Have a productive day,
Vicky
Siteliner looks like a great tool and have just tried it out on one of my sites. However it came up with 17% duplicate content and when I checked the pages it was actually picking up the duplicates as the header paragraph which also appeared on the main category blog roll page and archives and it picked up as duplicates my section of “other articles like this one you might like” as they all had a pic and the heading paragraph.
Wonder if there is any way not to check that? It might also be that there is currently less content on this site so if it does find those headers it is currently a greater percentage.
However it did give a lot of other great stats. I just think that if you get a high duplicate content percentage you need to check whether it is a valid answer by then using other tools to just look at the page content rather than the full page.
Hi Evie,
Yes I did notice that with one of my sites as well. I think though as the site grows, this will not be an issue. Since you can go through and check it, I wouldn’t be concerned if it’s content like you mention.
Thank you for your input,
Vicky
Thanks for sharing this information with me.
I haven’t used any of these sites yet and appreciate reading about them today. I will start using them for every article I write. I saw that Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Tool is only allowed to use once a day. I just tried them. So if I want to use them for free once a day, it is my choice. I will check out Siteliner as well as you advised me to do.
Tove
Hi Tove,
I just used the Small SEO Tool again and it will allow me to do multiple content checks. This is a great tool that you can use more than ones a day.
The Siteliner tool is of great help as well,
Vicky
thank you so much for this i used the siteliner tool and my site came up with just 2% duplicate content which is mostly my own from other pages so im very happy with that. Well done and good luck, keep up the good work x
Hi Dawn,
That’s great, 2% is very low, well done!
Sideliner is truly a great tool to double check,
Thank you,
Vicky
Great article. I learned some useful information and did not know these free plagiarism check tools existed.
Thank you! Very helpful.
Great, glad you found it helpful Brian,
Hello, Vicky, this is yet another very useful post from you because I have always known you as someone that comes up with something useful. Plagiarism is something every website owner should be worried about as that could sink your website to the bottom or worst still be met with a serious penalty by Google.
Now, how many percents of plagiarism would be disturbing should I use the Siteliner.com to scan my website? I just did and I don’t know what to make of it.
Thanks for sharing
Hi Nnamdi
So here’s my take on duplicate content.
There’s no penalty from Google for duplicate content, they will filter it and most likely not rank it.
If you pay for content, you want the content to rank organically and attract more visitors. With duplicate content you run the risk of not ranking…
If you have duplicate content on your site, check and see what kind of content it is. Maybe quote something maybe you use the same line at the end of your posts… this will not hurt you. Now if you copy a full article from another site and use it on yours, I would not recommend that. Taking somebody else hard work and use it on your site, without permission is not right. Google will probably just ignore it.
Hope that helps,
Vicky
Thanks for the helpful advice, Vicky. I like your ideas!
To be honest, I was disappointed by Duplichecker (sometimes it generates an unclear plagiarism report and you have to double check it using an alternative plagiarism software).
The rest tools in your list are excellent! Thanks for sharing them with us.
Thank you Lea, glad you found the article helpful,
Hey Vicky,
I agree with you absolutely, about outsourced content. Usually it’s written by, I will say kindly “amateurs”, who don’t care what and how to write. Also they can use spinners, to change already written articles.
I usually use plagiarism checker, just to be sure that everything is OK.
Thank you for your post, I have more and more convinced that better to write by myself.
Have a great weekends!
These are the great tools that can be used for checking the content quality and if the content is a duplicate.