I just love when my readers send me cool stuff to check out! This one comes from Garry Egan (sorry, he didn’t give me a URL to link to) and it’s a great tool for checking if anyone’s ripping your articles without your permission or giving you credit. It’s called Article Checker.

You can check simply by entering your URL (or the URL of the article) or by copying and pasting the text from the article into a search box. The thing I like is that it grabs your content in sentences or sections and checks against that, so if you’re wondering if someone’s ripping even partial content, you can find out this way.

The only thing I don’t see is a way to FIND the duplicated content elsewhere. Am I missing something?

Note: I’ve disabled comments on this post because people who can’t read are using it to submit their piece to check for plagiarism… *sigh*. I’m tired of deleting them - one woman called me from China ELEVEN TIMES to ask me to remove her piece.

If you have something to say on this subject, please contact me and I’ll post it for you.

Popularity: 82% [?]

Here’s a tool that basically just tells you how many backlinks each of the major three search engines “count” for your site. Don’t worry, Google will almost always have considerably fewer than Yahoo or MSN. But it’s yet another great tool for tracking your progress while either paying for a link campaign, or running your own.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Backlinks are a great way to see how popular your site is, who’s linking to you, and get an idea about who’s linking to your competition (so you can go after your own links from them!) and checking backlinks is something we do regularly for our clients. The idea is to get backlinks from sites that have a decent Google PageRank that are relevant to your own industry.

If you use this tool and find that there are a lot of sites linking to you that are NOT in your industry, you might want to consider politely asking them to remove the link. But be VERY careful with this! It’s not something you should do unless you really feel that the link will “hurt” your reputation either with visitors or with the search engines.

Popularity: 24% [?]