One of our clients recently had their website completely ripped off by a company which offers similar services in another state. When confronted by phone, they admitted guilt and took the site down right away. So at least in the end they did the right thing.
If we didn’t find this content, the client could have lost a year’s worth of organic search work and some amazing ranking because Google could have placed the page in the supplemental results due to duplicate content.
How do you find out if portions of your site are being plagiarized? Check out tools such as Copyscape. They have a free tool which lets you check for duplicated content from your site.
I’d be interested in finding additional applications which do the same thing.
Thanks to Andrew at YourSearchAdvisor for his help with this.