A Long Weekend…

I usually pride myself on responding to plagiarism quickly. However, these past few weeks have left me swamped and unable to take any action against my personal plagiarists. I haven’t even logged into my Gmail account that receives my Google Alerts until about the first of May, when I first started getting contacted by newspapers. I felt helping others and working with the media was simply more important.

Last night, with great trepidation, I logged into the account and the screenshot above is what I found (click to enlarge). After I eliminated non-plagiarism related items I still had over 110 new alerts since April 29.

Many of these, I have no doubt, will be false alarms (sites reusing content legitimately). Others will be duplicates or alerts that I receive after a work is removed. However, if averages hold true, about they will also reveal at least 25-35 plagiarists, possibly more.

While these numbers are higher than usual for a two week period, they are typical of peak times, which seem to come and go when dealing with a large volume of Google Alerts (130 in my case).

Still, if you’re wondering about the type of volume I deal with when it comes to plagiarism and why I focus so much on speed and effectiveness, this should explain a great deal.

No matter what though, I have a busy weekend ahead of me. Wish me luck.

Edit: I flipped through a few of the results and did some of the searches myself. It appears that the higher than normal volume may be due to massive Google reindexing.

I’m seeing an inordinately high number of results from Myspace, Xanga and other social networking sites and Google appears to have, finally, culled dead links. Searches such as this one used to bring up four pages of results, most of them dead links, now only bring up a handful of live links.

Also, many of these Myspace and Xanga sites are beating the original poems in the results.

Any SEO gurus know what’s going on?

[tags]Plagiarism, Content Theft, Google, Google Alerts, GMAIL, Copyright Infringement[/tags]