Managing a huge and active guest blogging community is exciting. I never stop discovering new and new things.
In fact, the scam I am going to share today isn’t new at all.
It’s been around for ages, but considering I’ve been involved in the content marketing for quite some time and have never seen this before, I’ve figured it may be new to you as well.
If you accept guest articles or outsource content creation, you’ll be as surprised to hear about this scam as I was. It’s almost impossible to catch!
Do these pieces look exactly the same?
Note: If you select the source code in the second column and click “View Selection Source”, you are most likely to be unable to see the wicked symbols even there (the above screenshots are made from the HTML editor).
Like Google, no duplicate content checker will ever recognize that line of text as a copy from the existing text.
How the Heck Could This Happen?
How Do I Detect the Scam?
How Can the “Alien” Characters Be Stripped?
Simple. The text from the second column contains Cyrillic character “?” which looks exactly the same as the English “o” but, taken from another language, it forms a new word.
WYSIWYG editor – Our very-much-loved WordPress Editor not only fails to strip the alien characters (which is quite natural as who knows what they should be converted into), but also fails to signal about them in any way (it turns the corresponding code into normally-looking characters). So if you are using WordPress and copy-paste the text from the second column into the “Visual” editor, you won’t notice anything. This makes the scam even more dangerous and easier to go away with. My WordPress even didn’t highlight the words with foreign characters as errors.
The best advice here: search Google! Even if the article you are going to publish passes Copyscape, grab a long phrase from it and search for the exact match to make sure Google understands it.
These guys are clever – pitty they can’t find a better outlet for their intelligence.
Good thing I got this heads up quite early. Been wondering how some of obviously copied articles still come up clean on plagiarism checks. Will look out for this one from now on.
Nice catch,Ann! This is a new one to me. As Keith said, what a shame they can’t put their brain to better use.
I’d expect that Google would be able to easily detect such tricks, if they consider it worthy of their attention. Since there’s little chance of any organic SEO benefit from such tactics, though, I suspect the most likely purpose is to bilk buyers of articles. Though dropping a link on someone else’s blog is certainly a possibility.
@Doc, Google is already best at identifying the scam (this is why I encourage everyone to search Google). But many people buying content and accepting guest posts may be unaware of the fact they are publishing nonsense! Unless they search Google, they will never be able to find out.
And you’d be surprised how well the scam is spread already. Several people in the thread I linked to above said, they had come across such scammers once or twice!
So the flip side is, someone else could be ripping off your content, selling it to the unsuspecting, and making it that much harder for you to find the instances of copyright violation (which it still IS). GREAT.
Its an occupational hazard this copying menace, and the sooner a solution is found to eradicate it, the better.
Wow, never thought about it. There are many languages and many letters which could be mixed this way.
Wow. This is really shady! Thank you for posting it.
Awesome, Greg! I have update the article to include your plugin!
You should add that you can’t copy and paste it into google because then you’re pasting the foreign characters. To check if its original, manually type 5-6 of the words all in quotations for the exact phrase search. Chances are, it won’t be original (at least the sources it was created from) but if it’s intended for SEO as well, that’s not even the issue. The bigger issue is it’s probably going to have negative value to google because to a computer (or word processor), it’s a mashup of nonsense characters from different languages with contain no real keywords or even words at all.
And yes I just got scammed by this on a Fiverr gig. Going to see what can be done about it.
Thank you Ann for providing the details of content writing scams that occur on sites like Fiverr. I myself was scammed once. Thanks again for creating awareness of these unethical practices.
Thanks for saving me from. a massive disaster which is coming. I am getting lots of guest post request and I think most of the guest post writer is following this is scam way to generate more article. Thanks again for giving solutions by which I can solve the alien coding issue.