Being original all the time can be tough, but copying another person’s work and passing it as our own is a punishable offense. Nothing can hit the credibility of a blog hard than a plagiarism charge.

It may not be you, but one of the new interns at the blog could have lifted content off another blog to make the deadline. How to ensure your blog’s reputation is not tarnished? Check out our coverage of 4 online plagiarism checkers after the jump for excellent ways to avoid plagiarism on your blog.

PercentDupe

PercentDupe is an online plagiarism and duplicate content detection tool. This web app offers two ways to check the originality of the written content in question. You can either use a weblink from your blog (either from a test blog or a published post) or just copy and paste the content in the text box. Results are pretty comprehensive with the link to the original article from where the content was copied and how much percentage of the content has been plagiarized from the original. Since the service is still in beta, PercentDupe lists a maximum of seven links from where the written content was copied from.

crossrefme

With its innovative & unique algorithm, crossrefme dredges through millions of web pages to check if the content under examination has already been published elsewhere on the Internet. The content check process as simple as copying & pasting text in the text box. The results page is nicely designed and displays multiple links from where the content is copied from, along with the percentage of similarity between both the versions. In addition to the individual percentages of originality, there is also an overall originality indicator on top of the results. The result also highlights sentences and words that have been copied from the original prominently. This tool is one of the best ways to avoid plagiarism.

Dupli Checker

With a bunch of options to tweak and multiple search engine integration, Dupli Checker is quite feature rich. Users can choose between the classic and advanced duplicate detection options. Neither of the option changes the way the search for duplicate content occurs, only the manner in which the results are displayed. When the classic option is selected, individual results are shown for each and every sentence. This sure is an unconventional way to check for plagiarism but the results turned out to be fine.

Results from the advanced search were more precise with only the most relevant duplication links listed and are presented in a more refined style.

Results from both advanced and classic modes were more precise with Google as the search engine, though users can toggle between Yahoo and MSN to execute the duplication checks.

Google

Now what to do when you forget to keep bookmarks of these plagiarism checkers or if any of these sites are down for maintenance? There is always the almighty Google to turn to. Online plagiarism checkers do not index the web themselves to check for duplicates. When you execute a plagiarism check, the algorithm under the hood of these websites searches the pages indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine for that matter. So in most cases, online plagiarism checkers act as better wrappers to deliver the results from a search engine. Let us go ahead and see how to search at the source.

In the search box, just type text followed by the content in quotes. The syntax is: text “Enter the content to check here”. Voila! We now have the links to pages from the content has been lifted.

Final Thoughts

During my evaluation, I found PercentDupe to be pretty good and very close to premium services like Copyscape. Though the Dupli Checker’s idea of searching for every sentence is weird, the results were fine in the advanced mode. The only downside of using Google to search for duplicates is that the search query is limited to 32 words. But considering the power of Google’s algorithm, the results were spot on.

For a list of more plagiarism checkers, check out our roundup on “5 Free Websites To Catch The Copycats” and the one about Plagium. Are there any other better ways to avoid plagiarism using online or desktop tools? If so, please share it us.