Thank you for the in depth article Nick, I really appreciate it.

Followed you on twitter 🙂

For most smaller websites (under about 30 pages or so), I just read it. Since one of the first steps to take when working on SEO for any website is to become very familiar with the way the site works and its content, it is pretty easy to spot duplicate content problems on smaller websites.
For larger websites, I use a combination of my own site crawler utility (I have no plans to make that publicly available), and whichever online tools will work best for a particular site (some sites are unable to be crawled by some online tools due to security measures on the site or host).
For finding content from your site which is duplicated elsewhere, Copyscape or just about any other plagiarism checker will do. For internal duplicate content, Siteliner usually works OK. But the results it or any tool will show are flawed. For example, it may not recognize text in navigational sections, or boilerplate text in the footer – so it may tell you that every page is something like 30% duplicate content.

As always, the best SEO tool is your brain.

One question.

Which tool do you use to check your duplicate content?

Kind regards,
FIlip

I see. Thanks Nick! This is really helpful 🙂

It would really depend on the type of hack, but a good first step is to get in touch with your web hosting company. Many hacks happen at the server level, and your hosting service may be able to stop any attacks that are in progress, and secure their own systems. If the vulnerability was on your website and not your web host’s server, restore your website from a backup and fix the vulnerability.