Do Your Homework When Looking For a Web Designer

Has someone copied you online?

Way back in our school days we were taught that we would get in deep trouble if we ever stole someone else's work and claimed it as our own. The practice of plagiarism is as old as printed word and since the invention of the internet, it has flourished. I'm sure you've all come across the story of the university students getting caught for copying an essay written and posted online by some other student on the other site of the world, but plagiarism today stretches far beyond a student's essay.

When you spend the time crafting your company's online image and brand you would hate for someone else to be stealing your website's content, let alone taking advantage of your carefully crafted text to create success for their business. But how would you ever know if this has happened? Thankfully, Copyscape.com has the solution. Copyscape is a FREE online program that allows you to input any URL into their search box; it then generates a list of websites with matching content. The program works by reading the text on your webpage and cross checks it with the entire web. Just like a search engine, if any matches appear Copyscape will display links to the similar sites, once you click the link you will be taken to the site in question, where Copyscape has highlighted all the words that are similar so you can see where the similarities exist from entire pages, all the way down to snippets of sentences.

This is a great tool for your website, not only to protect your content, but to safeguard yourself in case you may have in error 'borrowed' content from somewhere else. If you do notice a site that matches your content, I would encourage you to contact the website's owner and explain the situation of the "striking similarity in websites". Remember when accusing someone of copyright infringement, it's always a good plan to take the "informative" instead of the "accusative" route. Give them the chance to change it, because in the end all you really want is for your content, unique to your company to no longer appear on their website. Always keep in mind - we're in the business of building connections, not creating enemies.

Once again, I hope you can take advantage of this great tool from Copyscape.com geared at keeping the web unique and honest!

Chris Steingart is the founder and president of QTWebDesigns (http://qtweb.ca), an online solutions company located in Kitchener, Ontario. Chris works with his clients to create websites that are unique both visually and textually, and can be easily updated by his clients on a regular basis.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chris_Steingart