"Unique article" SCAM uncovered, heads up!

[lexilexi]

Hi folks,

I just uncovered a VERY sly article writing scam and wanted to tip people off. If I'm late to the party on this one then pls forgive me, but if it is new information then pay attention because it could be v important.

I purchased some "unique" articles, not from someone on WF, but from another community (Fiverr). I received them, and noticed they had some weird character encoding issues. When opened in certain softwares, they came up with lots of those funny square box characters. I complained to the seller, who said that they were in UTF8 and that my Mac wasn't set correctly, sent them in another format and I was good to go.

Articles seemed to be well written, human readable and unique: I copy-pasted a few phrases into Google and sure enough, no matches. Great! Then, I copied a couple of common words from the article into google. Zero matches. Weird.

So then I TYPED, instead of copied, a phrase from the article into Google and hey presto, my article is all over the web. It's word-for-word identical with 400+ other articles, I'm guessing they are PLR.

It appears that the "Unique article" seller is running the articles through some sort of "character set spinner", meaning that the article is unrecognizable to google even though the characters "appear" the same.
Doing a little research it might be a software called SpinChimp, I've seen their promo video and they claim to have an optional feature that alters the character set encoding so that the content passes for unique when it is not.

This is a big problem, because not only is google going to get hip to it at some point, if they aren't already, but by the time the lid comes off, there will be a lot of people who think their content is unique, but actually it isn't and so at some point their sites are going to get slapped and they won't know why.

Also, if your content is unrecognizable, it will have ZERO search engine optimization value.......

I'm imagining that these garbage articles will spread through the system like a virus, some people will only have themselves to blame for copying junk, but others, thinking they actually have unique content, will take an unfair blow.

Anyway hope this is of help to the community! Alex.

[Ken Strong]

This is the Copywriting Forum, and has nothing to do with article writing.

You might post this in the Main Forum.