You May Be Making This Mistake Now With Copyscape

[Boris_yo]

I had a content of 582 words which was written by outsourcer claiming it to be unique. I scanned it and Copyscape returned no results. Then i took part of content which seemed suspicious duplicate content consisting of 264 words, scanned it and only then Copyscape found URL where original content was located.

Here are 2 files i used:
http://www.filetolink.com/8c65d91e

File 336.txt contains 264 words which are part of whole article and file 588.txt contains 582 words which constitute full article.

Here are my steps:

1. I scanned 582 word content and here are results:
http://i1099.photobucket.com/albums/...2wordsscan.png

2. I scanned 264 word content and Copyscape found 2 URLs:
http://i1099.photobucket.com/albums/...4wordsscan.png

3. First URL in results was found to be containing 233 words matching 88% of that content:
http://i1099.photobucket.com/albums/...atecontent.png

Here is question i asked Copyscape staff:

Originally Posted by Me

Are you saying that if major part of my content is unique then Copyscape won't detect duplicate part? i.e. 30% duplicate content and 70% unique content? Does that mean that i must only scan content that i suspect to be duplicate?

Here is their reply:

Having run various tests, we noticed that the additional 318 words in the larger portion of text wasn't actually present in the URL you pointed out that was located when searching for the smaller portion of text.

As our statistical search algorithm bases its overall search on certain unique phrases throughout the content, if half of the words don't appear on the website, the search essentially gets watered-down so the quality of the search becomes inferior and in certain rare instances will not turn up a result. This case seems to be one of these rare instances.

As we mentioned, this is a rare occurrence and when running a search on a portion of text that has 30% plagiarised content it would typically return a matching result.

You're searches will certainly be more successful if the text you search has a higher percentage of plagiarised content.

I am disappointed with Copyscape. I always relied on them and was checking full articles. If i understood correctly there are rare cases when scanning full article won't return results even if there is part of plagiarized content. I had to re-scan over 50 articles 2-3 times to make sure nothing else is plagiarized, luckily there were none.

So my advice is to scan content which you suspect to be duplicate, or not to scan more than 250 words of content in a single scan.

UPDATE: Here are online tools for detecting plagiarised content (some are good and some are not, but i sorted them from effective to least effective, however you should test each and find which works best):

http://plagium.com
http://searchenginereports.net/articlecheck.aspx
http://www.articlechecker.com/checker.php
http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker
http://www.10dollararticles.com/adc.htm

DupeFree pro software is currently in its last beta testing stages soon to be released.

I also recommend scanning with multiple tools to be safe.

[Parto]

Great info, thanks!

[Kay King]

If you are using Premium Copyscape you'll have more accurate results than with the free option - and it's very inexpensive to use the Premium.

[TryBPO]

We've run into this problem with Copyscape as well...good of you to bring it up. We have our checker manually pull out 5-7 word strings and search for the phrase on Google as a double-check to help out...

[Heavenstorm]

are you doing the premium paid version of copyscape or the free version?

[Tina Golden]

It doesn't matter if you're using the free or premium version of Copyscape. I ran into this problem, too, which is why I no longer bother to use it. I had several articles written by one of my writers (at the time) that passed Copyscape as a whole, but when run through only one paragraph at a time, I found the duplicates.

And in my case, it was NOT just part of a web page. The entire article was the same. Copyscape did not catch it when doing the entire article at once.

Now, I just run several sentences or phrases from the articles through Google and don't pay for Copyscape.

[Robster0880]

Originally Posted by Tina Golden

It doesn't matter if you're using the free or premium version of Copyscape. I ran into this problem, too, which is why I no longer bother to use it. I had several articles written by one of my writers (at the time) that passed Copyscape as a whole, but when run through only one paragraph at a time, I found the duplicates.

And in my case, it was NOT just part of a web page. The entire article was the same. Copyscape did not catch it when doing the entire article at once.

Now, I just run several sentences or phrases from the articles through Google and don't pay for Copyscape.

mmm... Good to know. The only purpose and mission of copyscape and they can't get it right...

[yukon]

Or, just use Google.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22i+took+part+of+content+which+seemed+suspici ous+duplicate+content%22

[Tashi Mortier]

This is very strange because for me, it sometimes finds 1 % duplicates where just the main article keyword has been found several times.

You can see these here:

Copyscape page comparison
Copyscape page comparison

I don't trust this thing anyways, I'm just using it for the customers. I write all articles from scratch.

[contentclub]

Waw. That is strange. I use copyscape premium and I believe it with naked eye. Thanks for sharing. I will keep this thing in mind now onwards.

[App Developers]

Thanks for posting and giving us all the heads up on the situation. Always good to check.

[shulink]

I've always wanted to hire someone to write articles for my site, but plagiarism is something I'm afraid of as I don't want to get sue nor I want to get ban by Google.

[Boris_yo]

I use Copyscape Premium.

@Tashi Mortier

How did you get these links to search cache?

@shulink

You should use Copyscape along with other plagiarism checkers i just shared in my original post.

[Tashi Mortier]

Originally Posted by Boris_yo

@Tashi Mortier

How did you get these links to search cache?

When you see a result in CopyScape there is a button in the upper left corner, which says "Share this" or something similar. It will generate you such a URL that you can pass around. I use this to show my customers that there is nothing that I can do in this case, because this was the keyword they wanted me to write about.

[a2z]

Boris_yo,

Thank you for your 4-07-11 thoughts on Copyscape and suggestions. I have just started looking into this and found your suggestions. Also thanks to everyone else on this thread.