What is Copyscape?

The title of this post has two major terminologies (Spun Content and Copyscape). In case you don’t know what they mean, I will explain both of them.

Copyscape is a website that works with the same principle as Google. It is a plagiarism checker, and it’s common in the academic circle; it is used to check the work of a student to see if it isn’t a duplicate of another source.

In 2011, Google introduced Panda, and this surprised the world. Before the introduction of Panda, the best way to rank high was to create a lot of keyword-optimized content. Big sites like Gawker Media, eHow all benefited from the high content ranking.

Most sites didn’t care about what they were posting; as long as they were providing content, they would always rank high and make money. After the introduction of Panda by Google, the whole story changed.

Big sites started disappearing from the search engines, and some of these sites crashed and never recovered. Sites that were still able to stand had to raise their standard to a new level to stay in the game.

Now, this is where Copyscape comes into the picture; a lot of these big sites were able to provide huge amounts of content by stealing content from other sites and spinning them. Panda made sure that the act doesn’t go unpunished and increased the emphasis on the need for unique content.

People had to start using a plagiarism checker that has a wide range of reach to check if their content is unique; webmasters too started using it to check if they are safe. They think once they have passed the test of Copyscape they can also pass that of Google. Is this true? We will find out later on in this tutorial.