Nothing destroys your traffic in quite the same irritating manner as having someone else copy your content and divert your traffic to their site. That makes copyright violation an SEO issue...

The Blog Herald had a piece last month on a content tracker called FairShare.

FairShare creates a feed based upon your blog's URL that is matched against the sites that FairShare monitors and tracks across the web, comparing the content against the original by checking the number of words copied, whether or not the matching site links back, if there are ads on the site, and other copyright violations in accordance with your selected Creative Commons license.

You still have to decide what steps to take against the violator on your own, but knowing that your content is bing copied is half the battle.

A side note: part of the problem today is that the distinction has be lost in the public mind between copyright violation and plagiarism. Many bloggers think that if they cite you as a source, then they're not violating copyright. And, of course, they're wrong.


Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 283538