It is therefor essential for webmasters to regularly check the links that are posted on their websites and blogs to make sure that they are still pointing to the initial resource and do not return a 404 not found instead.

One of the best ways for WordPress webmasters is to install the WordPress plugin Broken Link Checker which will automatically check all posted links in all blog posts regularly to ensure that the links are valid. The initial lookup can take between a few minutes to several hours depending on the amount of posts and links on the blog. It took about 10 hours to find and check all links that have been posted at Ghacks.

The broken link count will be updated all the time and it is possible to deal with those links right away even if the plugin is still having links in the work queue. A click on the broken link count will open a table that displays 20 broken links per page.

The webmaster can display details about the link which will list the date of the link check and the error code that was returned. It is possible to delink right from the table which will remove the a tag from the link and keep the anchor name. Other possibilities are to exclude the link from future checks (good for false positives), to edit the url or to edit the post itself.

The plugin will automatically line-through broken links that have not been dealt with by the webmaster to inform visitors that the links are not working. The Broken Link Checker plugin is an excellent way of finding and removing broken links from a WordPress blog.

But this is naturally not the only way how work gets reproduced on the Internet. Other websites may cite passages of an article in their own articles which is a totally legit thing to do.

Keeping track of all the websites and discovering new websites that use your articles can be a time consuming task. A manual way to track them would be to enter key sentences into Google to find the websites that are indexed in Google that are using at least that sentence of your article.

An easier way is to use a service like Fairshare. Fairshare monitors RSS feeds that the user enters into their form on the homepage. It creates another RSS feed that will add all the websites as feed items that copy at least 20% of the words of an article of the initial RSS feed.

FairShare lists the percentage of the article that appeared on the other website, if a link back to the original site is present, if ads are displayed on the website and the url plus title of the article. Those information are excellent to discover the sites that are copying your articles.

It usually takes a few hours after adding a new RSS feed before the first feed items appear in the RSS feed of the copied articles. Fairshare will create another feed that posts a weekly summary of all the discovered items.

While FairShare is surely not discovering all websites that make use of other author’s articles it does a pretty good job at discovering the majority. The information provided are great to help webmasters depending on their use policy. Some webmasters probably only want to contact webmasters copying articles without linking back to the original content, others might want to ask websites that use ads to remove the content while some might want to ask all sites that copy 100% of their articles to remove them immediately.