As long as you're writing for an online audience, or paying others to write on your behalf, you'll need to look for any plagiarism. And if you teach courses on the internet, plagiarism check is necessary for all assignments written.

First, we'll look at the reason and the consequences is plagiarism. Then, we'll cover the most effective methods to search for plagiarism online using both free and paid solutions.

What kinds of plagiarism are there?

A study by Plagiarism Today identified 10 types of plagiarism across an array in terms of severity. One is the most egregious, and 10 the most minimal:

Why you should check for plagiarism

Your motives for checking for plagiarism can depend on the circumstances of your case, whether you're publishing someone else's writing, or marking the work of a course assignment for a.

If you're hiring a freelancer to create content for your website, take the time to examine every piece of work they provide to ensure that it's not copied. If they steal and you publish their work on your site, then you publish it on your blog, it's you who suffers the consequence.

Educators are like the people who oversee certifications and have an obligation to make sure that students know the requirements they must meet be able to do in order to pass. If you're allowing writing assignments or essays from your students, ensuring they are free of plagiarism is your duty as teacher.

Bottom line, if word gets around that you're easily duped with plagiarized work It can damage your credibility as a teacher, and an authority within your area.

Plagiarism as well as SEO

Plagiarism could hurt your rank on Google and could even see the site penalized. Since Google doesn't want to show two different versions of the same content, its algorithm checks for duplicate information. If one of your content is too similar to another the other, it may not be able to be excluded from search results.

"Similar" doesn't mean word-for-word, either. The algorithm is sophisticated enough that it is able to recognize the words of other articles and rephrase them such as "Jill and Jack went to fetch the water in a pail up the hills ."

Not only can you negatively impact your own SEO effort by receiving an infringement penalty, anyone could copy your work, and penalize you as a result. If you fail to take action, your whole website could be stolen.         SEMRush

Google's ranking algorithm can be complex, but if you're wanting to do a deeper dive, this article on duplicate content does an excellent job at dissecting its complexities.

Legal consequences of plagiarism

If you post plagiarized HTML material on your blog or even in an online course, you put yourself at risk of being accused of being sued or facing criminal charges.

When writing material, very few cases that involve plagiarism go to the criminal court. If you did end up in courts, the prosecutors are allowed to pursue cases with greater than $1000 in value.

However, the copyright owner may choose to sue you. In other words, they could threaten to sue you--unless you take away the offensive material. If you do, the fact that you make a payment out of your money or not isn't a factor: the damage is done. The reputation of your company has been damaged and it's easy to spread the word online.

How do you check whether there is a plagiarism problem online

Because plagiarism can be a serious matter in the publishing industry and in academia There are many plagiarism-checking tools are available online. A few are free, while others cost money.

The most effective free plagiarism checker tools

The free options to check for plagiarism aren't as robust as paid options, but they can work for a short time to establish whether there is plagiarism--before you use a paid tool to confirm.

Examining plagiarism using Google Search

It is among the oldest tricks included in the book and still performs well despite being entirely gratis.

You can check a writer's writing for plagiarism by copying and pasting snippets of their work into Google to see the results. If you find any results. Utilize quotation marks to search for specific sections that are not quotation marks, or you can omit them to locate passages that are lightly altered from other text online.

If you use this method opt for the longer, more distinct fragments. As an example, "Scuba diving is popular" is unlikely to be directly plagiarized, which will result in a variety of unrelated results.

"The dangers of the bends first came out through a series of essays that were written by Professor Rodney Bubbles" is much more likely to be it as a success.

In most cases, a quick google search will suffice to get the job donebut in the case of a large paper, you may want to make use of a specific tool to check for plagiarism.

Checking for plagiarism with a PlagiarismDetector.net free trial

PlagiarismDetector.net is a paid service, but they offer a free trial that will check up to 1,000 words for plagiarism. It's enough to fulfill similar purposes to an Google search--alerting you if anything has gone wrong, and allowing you to investigate further with the help of the paid-for service.

Starting at $20 per month, PlagiarismDetector.net will let you check up to 72,000 words, and use tools such as advanced reporting.

The most effective paid plagiarism checking tools

If you're ready to pay for the plagiarism checker from the beginning, or you feel that one of our recommendations doesn't work, and you'd like to take a deeper look--there are a few paid tools that stand out from the rest.

Grammarly Plagiarism Checker

A part of Grammarly's range of writing tools, the Grammarly Plagiarism Checker assures to test your document against 16 billion pages on the internet, plus the ProQuest databases for academics. This tool is able to examine documents with as much as 150,000 words.

For this application to use this tool, you'll require a paid Grammarly account. Subscriptions start at $11.66 monthly.

Chegg Plagiarism Checker

Chegg's writing software is like Grammarly however it is targeted more at students. Similar to Grammarly, Chegg features a plagiarism checking tool as one of their paid plans. It also includes citation tools and human proofreading services.

If, aside from creating your own blog or online course, you are also a student, Grammarly is the obvious option. Otherwise, Grammarly is more suited to the demands of a professional daily usage.

Chegg's paid packages begin at $9.99 each month.

SEMRush Writing Assistant

SEMRush is the right choice if you publish your blog. Besides the plagiarism detector it also gives you access to a suite of SEO tools you can use while you're editing the content. The plagiarism detection itself has been made specifically for writing SEO.

Plus The SEMRush Writing Assistant is compatible in a plugin for Google Docs and WordPress, which means you can test for content quality and plagiarism as you work.

Here's an example of a check we did before publishing this article:

It is evident that the article was graded 100% original. (Phew it would've looked awkward if we had plagiarized a blog post on plagiarism).

On top of looking for plagiarism, the tool also provides points for aspects such as readability, SEO and voice tone.

One drawback: It's not worth investing in SEMRush in order to verify plagiarism. SEMRush is considerably more expensive than either Grammarly or Chegg for that purpose.

It will cost you minimum $99.95 each month to use their whole collection of instruments.

  The word that ends  

Plagiarism can be a very serious issue, as long as you contract with contractors to write content for you, or accept writing assignments written by students as part of your online class You should be prepared to check for plagiarism.

The good news is that the web tools that we've discussed in the present make it simple to check for plagiarism.