Watch for these Article Writing Scams...

thehobbster

thehobbster

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Watch for these Article Writing Scams...​

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Ye Ole Copy-Pasta
So I've gone through a roller-coaster ride trying to find a decent article writer. I tried one who did well for a few orders, and then the quality hit the floor. Then I started writing all of my own articles, but this takes way too long for what is supposed to be a passive business. So yesterday I tried three more people. One of them already got back to me with the four articles I tried them on.

This person boasts in their sales thread on the forum that all articles are passed as unique through CopyScape before they are emailed out. So check out what I saw when I put it through my own premium CopyScape account (picture above).

What you are seeing is an article after I went in and edited some of it! All of the parts that are highlighted are the exact same words featured in the article I was given. This person literally searched eHow.com, found a similar article, and copy-pasta'd directly into a Word file and emailed it to me. I got this crap on four articles. The only reason some of it is white and not highlighted is because I edited as I was reading.

What you see is a 57% similarity. CopyScape found six other pages where the other 43% came from. Unbelievable. If you are outsourcing content, you MUST get a CopyScape account and check every article.

Spintax
There are other scams that people try to pull. One of them is copy and pasting a chunk of words into a spinner and then just spinning a copy. Some of you guys may not have heard of this. A spinner creates "spintax", which is a spin on the word syntax (pun intended!?!?). It is crap like this: {Today|Yesterday} {I|we} {sold|scammed} that idiot on Trickle Cheddar {some|a buttload} of {stolen|copy-pasta'd|ripped off} {articles|blog posts}. The spinner software goes in and randomly selects words from within the brackets to form unique articles. So watch out for that one. They usually don't sound real intelligent because it takes time to choose the synonyms that make sense instead of letting the computer choose. Most of these idiots will let the computer choose. The article ends up reading like a Martian wrote it.

Invalid HTML
Another one to look out for is people will copy and paste an entire article, and then hide single letters as the ASCII characters or whatever it is. They'll email you an HTML file so you don't notice that some of the letters are really crap like "&a42cQ". That way it passes CopyScape and passes your eye. But this will get you banned or deindexed in the search engines as well. This one is really low.

Article Writing Scams Are #*&$@!
So watch out for the copy-pasta. Watch our for the spyntax. And watch out for invalid HTML tricks. These are all scams that content writers will pull on you if you aren't equipping yourself with the tools and methods of protection. CopyScape is your best friend as far as article writing scams and outsourcing go. Use it. It's like 2 cents per check or something. Way worth it.

Originally Posted on March 3rd, 2011 on
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Crafty bastards. What rate were you paying? I'm assuming it'd be dirty cheap for someone to pull shit like that?
 
A similar thing happened to me with the first few articles I had ever requested. Content seemed great, better than I expected and it didn't appear to have any errors and even passed Copyscape the first time I checked it.

But when I got the second one back, I noticed a couple things that I wanted to update and pasted the content into my text editor and almost all the words on the page began to light up as incorrect spelling but I couldn't see it.

So I retyped the entire article word for word because for some reason the misspelled words couldn't even be corrected by the suggestions it was giving me. After pasting some of the words into Google, I saw results that were in a different language, weird right.

That's when it hit me, the writer was using similar English-looking characters from a different language to create the articles. Once published and ran through Copyscape, I discovered that it was close to 90% copywritten from an article that was about 4 years old.
 
I would recommend using TurnItIn as I have come across instances when Copyscape was not able to detect plagiarism as well.
 
Care to share where you were able to hire them? Not necessariy the site if you prefer, but if it's from a writer marketplace, writing agency, Upwork, etc.

Would be interested so as to be more watchful when getting from such sources, if they're ever a factor.
 
I had the same issue with a lot of stuff I got written on iWriter. If I wanted spun conent, I can spin it better and in less time than them :tongue:

I remember a writer on Upwork sent me a 500 word article 30 minutes after I requested it. Obviously suspicious, I googled 1 sentence and bam! A load of results came back.

However, I still recommend Upwork. There are some bad writers on there but I've found some very good ones too which are charging the same as the awful ones.
 
supafly said:
I had the same issue with a lot of stuff I got written on iWriter. If I wanted spun conent, I can spin it better and in less time than them :tongue:

I remember a writer on Upwork sent me a 500 word article 30 minutes after I requested it. Obviously suspicious, I googled 1 sentence and bam! A load of results came back.

However, I still recommend Upwork. There are some bad writers on there but I've found some very good ones too which are charging the same as the awful ones.
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It seems like yesterday, when I had to go through 15 articles fixing all the bad English, that's what .05 cents per 100 words will get you LOL.
 
I recently bought the $89 package from Spin Distribute for one of my own sites to see if it has any value. Figured I would incorporate it into my campaigns if it does. Has anyone used this?
 
I find it better to just try to find English speaking article writers to tackle this problem. Ask them for a sample or two of work to gauge how effective their content is. If they're bad, throw them away. Getting out of article scams just requires you to see if they are real or not beforehand.
 
On Upwork specifically, I've found it helpful to hop on a quick phone call or Skype with the person before hiring. Not perfect, but it weeds out a good amount of the fake profiles, etc, and gives you an opportunity to see how articulate the writer is. If they can't form sentences English and explain their writing process, they're generally not going to be a great hire...
 
Steve Johnson said:
On Upwork specifically, I've found it helpful to hop on a quick phone call or Skype with the person before hiring. Not perfect, but it weeds out a good amount of the fake profiles, etc, and gives you an opportunity to see how articulate the writer is. If they can't form sentences English and explain their writing process, they're generally not going to be a great hire...
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Looks like a logical good tip to me, everyone try to reduce his/her cost and being able to get a good quality for what they paid for, but when you pay cheap for sure quality is going to be s***.
 
Always get UpWork writers onto a Skype chat first and use some basic tests to weed out as much riffraff as possible. I've had great success finding college writers on craigslist for the same price as most article writing services.
 
I used to get that with Iwriter all the time and they would complain if I reject the article because it was all spun. When you read it you can definitely tell. I've been just going through independent writers and picking the ones I really like. I've started to use TextBroker and just giving a shot now it seems to be a lot more organized.
 
Textbroker is good ..as long as you create a team..as soon as you find good writer add him/her to team..or start out with creating 'casting call team' with 'application required'...
 
Invalid HTML
Using invalid HTML characters and foreign language letters is getting more prevalent from bogus writers.

Six months ago I hired four writers from Fiverr and three of them were taking articles off blogs and converting many of the letters so that it passed copyscape.

They are probably using a software that scrape and converts articles so they can sell them.

The articles read well and are good quality - but will get you into trouble if you use them. It wouldn't surprise me if G starts de-indexing sites with this kind of content.

Because I hadn't come across this before, I was initially happy with the articles ... until I saw the results in my browser. Setting up the gig, replying to questions and managing the results wasted about two weeks of my time and several hours.

So, we need to check the work carefully...
 
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