It is certainly not infallible, but years ago I started using this little trick, and it's alerted me to many dozens of people who have copied and pasted my posts to their sites and identified themselves as the author. This is not a post about plagiarism, it is merely an explanation (since many of you have asked) to explain how I embed links from my WordPress site into my posts.
The post that has been most copied and pasted from ActiveRain is one I did on 10 Commandments for Sellers. In item #5 are the words 'not be present' that is a link to a different post I did a while ago about the importance of Sellers not being home for a showing (Please Get Out). Instead of making the link stand out, I made it black to match the rest of the verbiage, and more often than not, no one notices it.
You can certainly put visible links in your posts that you want others to follow to your personal site or wherever, but I generally make one that's invisible unless you hover over the words. I only do this with posts that are of general interest to clients that other Realtors might copy and paste to their sites. I don't do it with listings or many other types of posts.
If you have a WordPress site, WordPress gives you a notification of PINGBACKS - where someone has linked or cited one of your posts. So when I started receiving a slew of pingback notifications for my (hidden) linked post on Please Get Out, I knew there was a problem.
WordPress shows you where your post was used. Here is an example: It shows the title the plagiarizer used for their post, the name of the website, and then a link to the actual post. I have hidden the names of the guilty, but this is the notification that Wordpress gave me.
There are wonderful sites available that you can use to track your posts if you're having problems. Two that I know to be good are DigiProve and Copyscape.
(And I'm sharing this information because I'm going to be using a service in the future.)
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