Section of an Article Plagiarised But Reworded

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   eugbugposted 6 years ago

   I discovered a couple of hundred words of an article copied but lots of the keywords were replaced with alternatives. It still has the same layout though and similar sub-titles.
   Can I report it? Technically it's not a copy since it is now different.

   replyreport
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      chef-de-jourposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      I go through a set routine for any copied material: polite email direct, threatening email direct, whois emails and contacts, DMCA.
      
      At present I'm completely clear of those nasty little red divvil cs.

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      bhattucposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      This is a problem being faced by many writers. In my opinion if the sequence of sentences is intact and only some synonyms are placed while replacing the original words, still it qualifies as plagiarism.
      
      It should be reported and they will delete it in due course.
      
      But how did you find it in this internet ocean?

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         eugbugposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         It didn't show up in a Copyscape search, but I don't have a premium account, so only the top 10 results are shown. I just happened to do a Google search and the piece of text I used was sufficiently similar for Google to find a match. The problem is that searching for a phrase doesn't always find copies because the plagiarists don't necessarily copy an entire article, just excerpts. I never came across that site before because presumably I hadn't searched for that string.

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   Will Apseposted 6 years ago

   It is difficult with this kind of theft.  I've seen plenty of '"articles" cobbled together out of  snippets from other articles for the sake of some text on a page which then provides a backlink for some site or other.
   
   You can report it to Google if the resulting article is essentially gibberish.

   replyreport
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   eugbugposted 6 years ago

   I decided to file a DMCA notice with both Google and the site host, so they can decide whether it's sufficiently similar for the complaint to be upheld.

   replyreport
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   eugbugposted 6 years ago

   Once the copied content is removed from a page, can the owners appeal to Google to have their page reindexed?

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      lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Yes.

      replyreport
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   Susana Sposted 6 years ago

   You only need a minimum of 6 words in the same order to report for a copyright violation. Also, if all the content on the site is spun you can report it to Google as a spam site which I find pretty satisfying

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      eugbugposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      That's good to know. I discovered a site also called Copyleaks that has a useful tool for comparing and highlighting words in the same order and showing stats for identical content, minor changes and related meaning.

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         DrMark1961posted 6 years agoin reply to this

         Related meaning? I am not sure there is anything you can do about that. Isnt that like idea theft?
         (I have this happen to me on a weekly basis.)

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            eugbugposted 6 years agoin reply to this

            I don't know how they measure that. I guess they look at the sentences in text that say the same thing but use synonyms. The plagiarist in my case seemed to replace words in each sentence by a synonym. There's probably even software that does this and spits out a variation of the original at the other end.

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      lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Ooh, that's good information to have.

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      EsmeSanBonaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      I did not know that!  This is GREAT to know!!!

      replyreport
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   Kenna McHughposted 6 years ago

   I am not surprised.

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   Kenna McHughposted 6 years ago

   Google any subject and most the stuff that comes up is similar.

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      lobobrandonposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      True, but that's because a lot of the ranking websites tend to copy ideas and Google tends to rank websites based on content and they want to see certain kind of content for certain search terms, so even if the majority of the internet is not a copy (it is) the end result would still be similar search results.

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