Most of us are well aware that some unscrupulous website owners are not averse to stealing content off your site and sticking it on theirs. This is not only a rip off of the hard work you put into producing your content but it could potentially damage your search engine rankings through the issue of "duplicate content".
Obviously the search engines don't want results 1 to 10 for a given search to be identical. Good search results need variety which is why Google and the others frown on duplicate content and can penalise sites that are guilty of it. Now it is believed that Google only penalises the second and subsequent copies it sees of any given content so in many cases it will be OK because Google will have seen the original first. But you can't count on that happening every time. If Google sees the plagiarised version before it sees the original then the original will be penalised.
Anyway I have found a terrific tool to help overcome this kind of thing, Copyscape.
Basically you feed it a url click go and it searches the web for any other pages that have copied any significant part of your page. And it really works!
I found a number of sites that had ripped off content from FastSMS, PlanetStream and NetSecrets and have taken first steps to getting them removed. There's no guarantee the plagiarisers will comply in all cases but Copyscape also gives some advice on tackling that.
Give it a try and if you find anything interesting please come back and add a comment.
