Knowing if an article has been encoded

Why would you do this to people Ruth? It is stealing and you will be hurting others that do not know you are doing it.

 

Do What Vfleming? I only responded to someone who is concerned her paid articles may be encoded.

 

Oh, I'm sorry Ruth, I must have misread your comment, my mistake. I can understand her concern, this is why I started this thread. I Was trying to find another way.

To catch this type of things, this is what I found.

You can spot check some of the phrases in Google search. You need to hand type them to be safe. If it is encoded, you will see exact results come up.

There is a tester links above in he thread. I have tried it with some of my articles but have not tested with a known encoded article to verify it catches it. I don't have one and have not had time to encode one to test.

I'm not sure if posting in notepad would strip the coding away so it shows the odd text. That would be perfect it it does. I would think that would be the easiest. Once I encode an article and do some testing, I'll post back or create a new thread on how to spot them. I will also link to it here if I create a new thread.

Again, I'm sorry for misread your comment above!

Vince

 

No problem, Vince, we all make mistakes I am happy I have been made aware of this problem. I buy, once in a while when I have burnout, good quality articles, but never knew I had to be aware of encoding. Another aspect of online marketing to be careful with ... all the best in your endevours, Ruth

 

Wow, that's very sneaky indeed. I had no idea people went to such lengths to plagiarize.

 

Wow, Neither did I. Would those encoded characters remain if you pasted them on a notepad?

 

I agree with this. Copyscape only detects exact matches (even proper names you cannot and shouldn't change), so it's not as effective as a duplicate content detector.

 

Not sure about Notepad but there's a tool I just stumbled across - http://www.nousphere.net/cleanspecial.php. Paste in what you think is encoded and it'll strip the text of sneaky characters. Be sure to select the 'HTML' option before you hit 'Submit'. This tool will retain normal characters and convert special ones to their numeric codes. Useful to check encoded text, I think.

People will go to any length to make a quick buck. Sadly, some people think content writing is one of the quickest ways to fill their Paypal; they think they can copy stuff easily available on the Internet, rehash it and pass it on as original content. Rehashed or plagiarized content is not only incapable of generating any organic traffic, it also hampers readability and adversely affects social engagement. I've never seen sites with spun/copied stuff surviving for long.

EDIT: Another tool - http://www.webestools.com/online-ht...ter-escape-accents-eacute-grave-utf8-iso.html.
Yet another - 1) http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561387-html-encoder-decoder.aspx (Select 'Do HTML encoding' before submitting.) 2) http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561392-text-to-html-converter.aspx (Keep 'Encode HTML tags (if present)' check-box checked.)

 

Here's another tool I just found - http://www.htmlescape.net/htmlescape_tool.html. Simply paste the text you wanna check in the empty box below 'Enter/paste text to HTML Escape:' Make sure the 'Escape special characters (& and non latin chars)' check box is checked. When you paste the text you wanna check, the result will be immediately shown in the box below 'Escaped result with HTML entities:'. If the inputted text contains encoded or sneaky characters, their corresponding numeric codes will be displayed in the 'escaped result' box. If all characters in the inputted text are normal, the SAME text will be displayed in both the boxes.

I Googled search terms like 'online tools to detect encoded characters', 'how to remove special characters from html' etc. There are a lot of scripts in Java, PHP, Python, C, C# and other languages available for detecting encoded characters along with a host of online and offline tools. I guess it's also easy to develop your own executable if you're good at coding. The encoded characters can also be detected or filtered if you 1st) save the text you wanna check as a simple html file, 2nd) edit, add or remove some tags from the source code and then 3rd) view the file in any browser in normal mode. Moreover, there's a function in MS Excel (or any spreadsheet program) that converts characters to their corresponding numeric codes, which easily allows you to check up on sneaky bits in a piece of text. I'm not sure about which HTML tags those are exactly and the function you can use in Excel, but I'll update here once I come to know. Would really appreciate if someone who knows posts it.

 

That's awesome information. Thank you very much for sharing,
Ruth

 

I hadn't seen an encoded article for at least a year, but I probably brought it on me by replying to this thread
A few days ago someone bought my gig in Fiverr and sent and encoded article to be posted on one of my blogs as a guest post. And you know how I understood that the article was fishy? When I opened it in Word, spellchecker underlined most words even though they appeared to be written correctly. So that's another way to see that an article needs checking.

The buyer probably didn't even know it was encoded as his keyword in the article was encoded as well . What's sad is that he didn't send a new article and didn't pay for my gig extra to get it written for him, so I had to get the order mutually cancelled, which he accepted.

Long story short, if you are selling links as guest posts on your sites, check the articles!

 

Well I don't know whether to feel naive or oddly proud of myself for having no clue that this is a thing. No surprise that fake content flops. That's just the way it should be.

I'll admit that it's little bizarre to me that anyone would treat content writing as a "get rich quick scheme" But then these are probably the same people who handed in essays for class that was downloaded off the Internet.

Oh well, I guess this is the flip-side to people who grew up writing. Instead, we have people who grew up plagiarizing trying to get paid for the "privilege" of hosting their stolen work.