I recently found out about a writer I hired submitting ripped off content. It got into a bit of a rant about it so I decided to post it to my blog:
http://www.internetmarketingstrategies.com.au/610-content-writing-for-seo-warning
Has anyone else ever experienced this sort of thing before?
And how do you guys go about double checking to make sure your content is 100% unique and original?
Realistically it is difficult. You can run your articles through copyscape (upload to your website, then give copyscape the URL). The free version has limitations as to how many you can check per month.
You can run through various other sites where you can copy and paste the article text and they will do a search. (eg articlechecker.com/)
The thing to remember is that many articles written have been copied and spun. That is, people can use a simple program that loads an article and then they spin the words, sentences and paragraphs and create a multitude of combinations which lead to 100's if not 1000's of possible articles. If, as a native English speaker, the words do not flow 100% correctly, then start to be suspicious.
However, the most common problem with this is they are usually the exact same word count as the original article. To a human eye, you probably wouldn't notice, but for the brainiacs at Google, they have worked this out (of course never officially stated, but rumoured). It, imho, is imperative to create or pay a premium for well researched content for your main ranking sites and for the leading article directories. For lower tiered article directories and junk sites, use spun or cheaper quality articles.
How can you protect against this? Well you can't really. All you can do is try your best to find a reputable article writer and randomly run portions of the article through various copy checking sites.
Otherwise, you'll have to write your own. That is the only way to guarantee unique and original content.
