This article is not meant to highlight the features of Copyscape but to provide alternatives to it. This will help you to always maintain the originality of your work.

Some of those Copyscape alternatives include:

1. PlagScan

This is an alternative plagiarism checker of Copyscape which many academicians and institutes use worldwide. It checks for copied work from a massive number of websites and journals. It gives results not just on plagiarized texts but also on potential plagiarism as well as possible references. PlagScan is a major asset in ensuring academic originality.

2. Dustball

Another great Copyscape alternate for professional writers is Dustball. This plagiarism checker does not have any unseen tricks, and you can easily access its services and tools in its free version. If you are a professional writer or you employ freelancers very often, Dustball is a wonderful alternative to Copyscape, in discovering copied work.

3. WhiteSmoke

Now, this is a plagiarism checker with some distinctions. WhiteSmoke does all the things that Copyscape or any other plagiarism checker will do for you. It, however, goes one step further, just like Grammarly, WhiteSmoke also serves as a wonderful means for editing. It checks for both grammar and spelling errors in your work.  WhiteSmoke is a great tool to help prevent your website from getting penalized by Google, leading to a low ranking.

4. Duplichecker

Duplichecker is a completely free and accessible plagiarism checker and many top essay writing services recommend Duplichecker as a viable alternative to Copyscape. All you need to do with Duplichecker is upload the document or the text itself in the search box and hit search. You can be assured that every single sentence and phrase will be checked.  For unregistered users, there are three free trials, to however gain unlimited access, you have to create an account.

5. Small SEO Tools

Another one of the best Copyscape alternatives is Small SEO Tools. It is completely free and actually requires no sign-ups whatsoever. Many freelancers and professional writers love this tool because of the ease and the fact that it’s free. All you need to do is paste the content in the plagiarism checkbox, fill out the CAPTCHA that will appear, and wait. It searches and brings out your results after a short while. It’s important to note that it has a limit of 1000 words for a single search.

6. Plagiarism Detector

This is an interesting alternative to Copyscape. It allows for sentence-by-sentence checking for plagiarism, amongst other very remarkable features. It allows users to compare each of the sentences with similar ones on Google so that they can detect if their sentences are copied or adapted from other sentences. Most of the features on the Plagiarism Detector are free and do not have any limits. However, there are some premium features that have limits and to fully access them, payment is necessary.

7. Plagiarisma

Here’s another alternative plagiarism detector.  This particular checker supports over 180 languages, although it allows only three searches per day. The drawback with this checker is that it does not look for copied or plagiarized content on Google in its free version. To get a Google cross-checking on plagiarism, you will have to use the paid version. This also applies if you want to increase the limit for searches.

8. Quetext

Article writers and all kinds of writers generally love this plagiarism detector. In fact, editors at My assignments-help frequently use it as an excellent and more affordable alternative to Copyscape. Article Checker does not require that you register or subscribe and it produces trusted results in a matter of seconds. Another great feature of this checker is that you need not upload documents or links, you can simply copy and paste the text that you want to check.

9. CopyGator

This uses a completely different style to ensure your content remains original. CopyGator is best for blogs and websites that have RSS feeds. It simply monitors the feeds of your blog or website, and it notifies you if any of your content is duplicated online. It is like a plagiarism alarm that notifies you that your content has just been copied and published online. To activate it, all you need to do is supply it with the RSS feeds of your website or the website you want to put under surveillance. The Big Bang Dissertation team often uses it to check their work.

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Conclusion

The effect of plagiarism on any work ranges from penalties to embarrassment and disappointment, at various levels. It is therefore very prudent to always check for the originality of the content you intend to publish. While Copyscape has been a great resource over the years, if, for any reason, you can’t make use of it, this article has shown that there are a ton of other tools waiting out there. Next time you want to check for content originality and Copyscape is not within your reach, you know what to do!

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The post Copyscape Alternatives for Online Plagiarism Checker appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Many years ago, Google was using an ancient ranking system that was calculating authority and relevance based on the total number of backlinks a site was featuring. When the system was abused by manipulative, black-hat SEO techniques, Google’s algorithm suffered significant modifications.

Nowadays, “good” backlinks must be built naturally, and they must bring a lot of relevancy. The bad ones? They draw lots of ranking penalizations and “sandboxing” punishments. As a webmaster, SEO practitioner, or digital marketer, you’ll need to acknowledge the potential Google penalties that your site could suffer due to “bad backlinking tactics” and optimize your approach as quickly as possible.

In today’s post, we’ll discuss several backlinking tactics that can harm your blog ranking position. Make sure that you avoid these approaches at all costs. Stick by the rules and your rankings will be rarely harmed.

Article Directories

The world of SEO is continuously changing as time goes by. A few years ago, article directories used to be one of the best methods of cultivating “working” backlinks. It was simple, cheap, and effective: post one blog post on ten article directories and get hundreds of backlinks from websites that “borrowed” your content with the condition of pointing one or more links back to your site.

As more and more webmasters used this tactic, the quality of the content suffered big modifications: poorly written content, duplicated content, and keyword-stuffed content were all over the place. Google took action and started penalizing low-quality backlinks that came from exploited article directories.

Nowadays, posting your content on article directories is a high-risk attempt to grow in rankings, so you’d better avoid it. Guest posting is fine, as long as the website that links back to your blog doesn’t feature duplicated or spun content.

Purchased Links

“If you want to rank your blog faster, you should write more content, engage with more relevant niche industry blogs, and create better experiences for your visitors. Of course, that takes time. Many webmasters are trying to speed up the process by purchasing backlinks from various sources, so they’ll eventually get burned.” – admits John Blackwater, marketing manager at Essays.ScholarAdvisor.

Whether you or anyone else is aware or not, Google is hunting down anyone who approaches this tactic. Paying for links is an official unaccepted practice, and the consequences are severe. The benefits are promising, of course, yet the potential damage makes this backlinking strategy not worth it.

Here’s a screenshot that shows their official guidelines on the matter:

PBNs (Private Blog Networks)

A private blog network is a service that allows webmasters and SEO marketers to buy link space on various blogs and website domains. A PBN is comprised of more websites or blogs, typically managed by a single person and designed to offer backlinking space to anyone who pays for it.

There are two ways in which you can buy links from a private blog network:

• You can write a new blog post and place your link inside -> the PBN posts the article, you get the backlink.
• You can place your link into already-published blog posts within the PBN -> you get the backlink immediately after paying.

Can you see the problem?

The previous heading explained how paid backlinks represent a tremendous risk. Since 2012, Google’s actively pursuing and shutting down PBNs. Now. If you buy a backlink and the PBN gets busted, Google will discover your backlinks and will severely decrease your rankings.

Sitewide Sidebar or Footer Links

The sidebar and footer areas of a blog can be used in many ways. However, many webmasters have started cramming suspicious links inside them, so Google took action.

If you think about it, the average reader won’t pay much attention to these sections, so sneaking one or two backlinks has become a widely adopted practice.

Usually, these links are anchor texts that are very rich in keywords, and they are often variations of what the average person would insert in the search bar. Here’s an example:

Now you know exactly what you must avoid. If you come across these types of links on various websites, please check their rankings. More often than not, blogs and websites that adopt this practice will suffer negative ranking consequences.

Disguised Blog Comments

Even though blog comments aren’t necessarily a productive way of improving a blog’s rankings, many webmasters are tempted to try them. They count as backlinks, though they’re not as heavy as the regular backlinks that are part of the main editorial content.

A disguised blog comment is manipulative when it’s comprised of keyword-rich anchor texts that make no sense whatsoever. Here’s an example:

If you ever thought of faking your comments and using this manipulative SEO strategy, you should drop the idea now. If somebody else (who you don’t know) posts such comments on your blog, you should immediately remove them because Google won’t really investigate the situation. If your blog is featuring these types of comments, you’re subject to Google’s penalties.

Poor Quality Reciprocal Link Exchanges

Don’t get me wrong – building connections with various industry bloggers is a great way of improving your backlinks profile and an exceptional way of showing Google that you’re focusing on healthy link-building.

However, if a local Australian website that sells baby products links back to one of your graphic design articles, Google is going to raise some questions.

If you link to a highly relevant website and they link back, once or twice, that’s completely fine. If you exchange links hundreds of times, you’re basically manipulating Google’s algorithm. Therefore, if you choose to use this tactic, make sure you’re always exchanging backlinks with blogs and sites that are within your specific industry and that you never exaggerate it.

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Takeaways

Backlinks are an essential factor in all SEO strategies. Everyone’s building them, one way or another, some better than others. There’s no “safe haven” for backlinks, no shortcuts, and no concrete rules (unless the ones specified by Google itself).

Effective backlinking is a process that demands time, attention, and consistency. As you keep posting backlinks, you’ll eventually identify what works and what doesn’t, even if that means you might suffer little damage along the way. But, if you take our advice into consideration, you should significantly decrease your odds of hurting your rankings!

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The post Backlinking Tactics That Can Harm Your Blog Ranking appeared first on Tricky Enough.