Can I use Google Search to determine if my website contains original or copied content?

Can I use Google Search to determine if my website contains original or copied content? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, duplicate-content, to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Can I use Google Search to determine if my website contains original or copied content?.Problem :

I have a few websites from customers that have (partially) the same content as other websites. I plan on rewriting all content that is not original, but how do I know if my websites have original content, or content that's been copied from another website?

My customers say all the content is original, but I have my doubts to be honest. They often let other people who don't work there anymore write content for the sites.

What I did so far is copy a line from my website that can be found in other websites as well and pasted it into Google Search. If my website is the first link, would it be considered the original source?

Solution :

Yes you are correct. When searching for content in Google the site at the top of the search results is considered the Authoritative (least in Googles eyes) source of the content. This doesn't necessarily mean the original source, Google sometimes gets it wrong, but the most part is pretty accurate at figuring out the original source.

If doing a search for the content and no exact results are returned, you can do a search and put the search term within inverted commas (")

" this would be your search term"

This will return results only for the exact term. Also don't search for big chunks of content, as somebody may have copied only a small portion. I normally check sentences or paragraphs.

While copyscape is a useful tool, it won't let you know which results are the original, or ranking first in Google. So I sometimes use copyscape, but always use a Google search to determine which site has the authoritative ranking in Google.

Use CopyScape http://www.copyscape.com/

It will show you what part, and what percent of the text is copied from other sources. Of course no content can be 100% original. Paraphrasing is not an illegal thing and is an integral part of content writing. But it's about the total percent of the text on a specific web page.

Note that with the tool above you will see content that was copied from you as well. So be sure to check the date of publication of the web pages in question, perhaps they copied from you.

If the issue about seo, google-search, duplicate-content, is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.