Knowing if an article has been encoded

Hi all, I have searched and searched and can not find anything. How can you tell if you purchased an encoded article. I know that price is obviously a sign but that doesn't mean that you are not getting one for a higher price.

This might be a dumb question, maybe I'm just paranoid. But buying articles off Fiverr, or even on DP you never really know.

I know I can spot check phrases by typing them into Google search, just wondering if I copy and paste the whole article into something like notepad would strip any coding and show up odd?

Again, sorry if it is a dumb article but I'm looking to buy bulk articles to keep fresh content posting daily and just don't want to ruin my sites.

Thanks

 

What do you exactly mean by 'encoded'?

 

I know exactly what you mean. I have received some of those articles myself from time to time. Whenever an articles looks too good for the price, it's worth a check. Also, if people who are not from an English speaking country submit amazing content with good ideas and perfect English, I know it's fishy.

Anyhow, here is a tool to check - http://www.cynosurex.com/Software/Text Encoding Detector/

 

Very sneaky process in which normal ASCII (or UTF-8 or Unicode) characters are replaced by non-standard characters that look the same, but aren't. For example, you replace every 'e' with a cyrillic or other character that looks the same but which duplicate checkers won't spot. The article comes up as unique, when it's actually an exact copy with sneaky character replacement.

And thanks, @syda, for the tool link - VERY useful!

 

Ah I see. Never knew replacing normal characters with non-standard ones that look same is a way to dodge plag checkers. Folks will just come up with anything! Thanks anyway.

Thanks. The tool relieves me a bit. Where there's a virus, there's also an anti-virus.

 

A few years ago when I hadn't heard about this and used some auto submitter thingy to upload articles (sent by new "excellent" writers in my team) to my blogs I was going crazy trying to figure out why all the words in my content were missing some letters.

 

Now that you know it, the "excellent" writers in your team will probably go crazy trying to figure out why their Paypal is missing some payments.

 

Actually, I see it a lot less these days. The new trend is to use automated rewriting software to create the articles and then edit the first two sentences to look neat (hoping the client won't read further) and take care of some major problems throughout the article. This is much more difficult to detect and put your finger on. It may be how they actually write, but probably isn't. The downside is that you can't really prove it.

 

Not sure how the latest rewriting programs work, but I bet any software can NEVER rewrite as effectively or perfectly as a human. Clientele, on the whole, has become very savvy now and people just won't scan the first few words and publish the content as it is. They go through the entire text thoroughly. Yep, catching deception is hard when you rely *solely* on tools like plag checkers or grammar checkers. That's actually why we've got HUMAN editors and proofreaders in the first place.

 

You are right about editing and all, but it's hard to prove that the writer has used software to "write" the article, they just tell you that it is all their own writing. With encoded articles, at least it's easy to prove.

 

If you simply do a cursory inspection of the text you receive, it would be hard to make out whether the content has been really written by a human. However, if you carry out a thorough and detailed audit, you can find out the flaws without much trouble. A piece of content that has been produced by a software, no matter how sophisticated it is, will lack the naturalness, flow, coherence and context of one that has been written by a good-quality human writer.

 

I'm sorry, but this whole thread is a cringe-fest. Encoding characters? How low do you have to be? You know what's the saddest part about this whole thing? Some jerk will come hear, read this thread and then go 'Hey, this is a great way of earning money! I'll do this!'

This is probably the lowest form of 'copywriting'. I mean, if you're writing copy and you're bad - at least you've done the work all by yourself.

 

Scams are everywhere. You might, for example, want to ask the site in your sig why they're using an image of Indian actress Yami Gautham as "Chahna, India" on a testimonial. (No, not saying it's a scam - it just makes people wonder, much like the stock photo used for "Andrey, Russia".)

It's like spinning: it takes zero time and it's free money if you can get people to fall for it. As always, the desire for "something for nothing" is overwhelming.

 

Another example of a bad job that a random freelancer can do, if he's looking for some easy cash. Nothing more.

 

Thanks everyone! I'll check that checker out tonight.

When you run into $1-$3 articles, believe it

 

Wouldn't Copyscape show any duplication out there?

 

No, encoding will show as unique and pass copyscape. It is evil shady.

Copyscape doesn't look for it. Would be a nice feature though.

 

Even if Copycape Premuim is able to catch encoded characters this thread talks about, it DOESN'T mean that content is not plagiarized. Copyscape ONLY searches for an exact match of the inputted text. If you replace words with their synonyms and change the sentence structure a bit, of course WITHOUT altering in ANY way the meaning of the source content, Copyscape WON'T be able to catch it. 'Copyscape-passed' is NOT a foolproof means to guarantee that a piece is unique or original. Still, buyers are many times very insistent on content being 'Copyscape-passed', the reason for which I've not been able to understand till now.

 

And writers will actually do this? Really? Wow, I never would have thought of that. Is there any way when you get a paid for article you can paste it and have encoding changed/disabled? Like posting html to plain text?

 

I guess every text editor/word processor/browser supports multiple character encodings and allows you to switch from one to the other. There must also be a lot of offline and online utilities that enable you to convert character encodings from one format to another. Google and you'll easily find them out.