Content Scam Alert: Using Foreign Characters to Make the Piece Look Unique

15 Comments

1. Hi Ann
   These guys are clever – pitty they can’t find a better outlet for their intelligence.

   Thanks for the warning.

2. Yow Ann!

   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.

   Ai

3. 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.

   Thanks for the heads-up.

4. @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!

5. 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.

6. This article is totally new for me. I have never think for such type of alert.l have heard about a lot of scam but it is totally different. Thanks for putting this blog and to alert everyone…

7. @Holly, well, yes, but.

   The good thing is that the content that the scammer creates by ripping your articles and substituting some characters, that content in the end makes no sense to Google

   It will still look good for the end reader but hopefully that reader won’t be able to find it (since the page won’t be normally indexed as an English one and thus won’t be found anywhere in Google)

8. Its an occupational hazard this copying menace, and the sooner a solution is found to eradicate it, the better.

9. Wow, never thought about it. There are many languages and many letters which could be mixed this way.
   But for scammers it also takes times to compose such “articles”. It seems for me it’s not popular technique, but of course bloggers must be aware of it

10. Ann,

    Wow. This is really shady! Thank you for posting it.

    In a shameless self-promotion, I’ve created a simple edit for your WordPress theme that will automatically uncover this hidden character scam in the same way that the decode tool to does:

    http://www.gregboggs.com/decode-your-wordpress-content-to-utf-8/

11. Awesome, Greg! I have update the article to include your plugin!

12. “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.”

    – – –

    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.

    To google’s eyes, an artile in UTF with foreign characters will have about as much value as a page full of random letters and numbers. Because that’s exactly what it is…

    And yes I just got scammed by this on a Fiverr gig. Going to see what can be done about it.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. Very informative article Ann, I have also been scammed by a few writers with such practices, the content was extremely well written but despite being there for months, it wasn’t driving a single visitor.

    We need to beware of such scams, its a serious waste of money.

    Thanks