Copyscape Question

[googlealchemist]

Just brain vomiting here...

Copyscape is just checking for straight up plagiarism right?

Is it doing so on a very, very exact level or is it checking for at least slight variations of a few words or sentences between changed around or rewritten?

I sort of answered my own question reading their faq page, and from thinking of how the results came back when I used them before (it's been a while) "When a match is found, it could be that one page has copied from another, that one page is legitimately quoting another, that both pages are quoting from the same external source, or that similar phrases happen to appear on both pages by chance. It is up to the user to examine each case carefully and determine the nature of the similarity found."

Is this something that could/would tell you anything useful as far as keyword cannibalism on your own site between articles in a silo?

I recently read here, I'm pretty sure by @Ryuzaki about checking for competing urls in search console for that too, but I was just curious.

I guess my main question is, are you guys using this or something else to check content you get from outside sources or how are you managing that?

Anyone using their sentry service?

Thanks

 

[Ryuzaki]

Is it doing so on a very, very exact level or is it checking for at least slight variations of a few words or sentences between changed around or rewritten?

I think they check for one-to-one matches. No spinning, no AI, no syntax or synonym checking, etc. It'll protect you from copy and pasting and from lazy writers who aren't motivated enough to re-word every sentence fragment and start seeing what they can get away with.

I guess my main question is, are you guys using this or something else to check content you get from outside sources or how are you managing that?

I quit using Copyspace because they always delete my damn credits and are like "whoopsy they expired, buy some more".

It's a layer of defense and I like it when content agencies use it. Some will screenshot the result and send it to you, and others will just claim that they used it. It's worth using to catch the most egregious nonsense before it gets published on your site. Will need to be tacking on AI detectors, especially when any of them become reliable.

It's kind of like a tax to pay at this point. Either pay it or risk publishing plagiarized content, which we're likely doing anyways, just re-written by a human, but at least it's not copy-and-paste.

 

[tziahs]

Copyscape is very good at detecting direct plagiarism (when a writer copies and pastes a text directly) or complete plagiarism (when the entire piece of work is copied).

However, it doesn't detect paraphrasing (changing some words) and mosaic plagiarism (interlaying your text inside an existing text), which many writers do.

Of course, it only works for text that is already online (this is obvious, but I have to mention it because I've seen it happen - some writers plagiarize content directly from books).