In this article, we want to share with you an experience we recently had. It’s about a new way professional copywriters are “deceiving” their clients.
Well-known methods of poor-quality text uniquization
Most methods of deception used by copywriters have long been known, as well as the ways to detect them. The most common techniques of poor-quality text uniquization for website promotion are:
➤ Replacing words with synonyms using synonymizers;
➤ Substituting Cyrillic letters with Latin ones (e.g., А, В, С, Е, Н, К, М, О, Р, Т, Х; а, с, е, о, р, х, у);
➤ Automatic translation of texts from one language to another.
Such manipulations are easy to detect if you carefully read the text and check its uniqueness using services like Candy-Content, PlagiarismDetector, and others.
A new way of deception
Recently, we encountered a more complex and curious method of deception, which is almost not mentioned online. The text looked well-written and interesting, and the check showed 100% uniqueness. However, we were alerted by the fact that Microsoft Word underlined all the words as incorrect. When copying a phrase from the text into Google, no plagiarism was detected, but the search results either returned meaningless phrases or a message saying "Nothing found."
Example:
When entering part of the text manually into Google, we found sources where the text completely duplicated the one that was ordered. It became clear that the uniqueness was created artificially, but the mechanism remained a mystery.
Investigation: how does it work?
At first, we assumed that a simple replacement of Cyrillic letters with similar Latin ones was used (A, B, C, E, H, K, M, O, P, T, X; а, c, e, o, p, x, y). However, checking the text in Notepad++ using regular expressions that include only Latin characters revealed nothing.
Digging deeper, we paid attention to the URL of the search query in Google. It contained the symbol %E2%80%AD, which was not visible in text editors. This symbol in UTF-8 encoding (U+202D) stands for "Left-to-Right Override" — a character that changes the text direction from right-to-left to left-to-right. In the URL, it is represented as %E2%80%AD, where % precedes each byte of the character. When the text is decoded, this character remains invisible but affects how the text is perceived by search engines.
Interesting fact: the method of text direction override can be used to spread malware via email, which makes it potentially dangerous.
However, the issue wasn't just in the %E2%80%AD character. After removing it from Google’s address bar, we were still getting incorrect search results. Further analysis showed that the Russian letter “о” in the text was replaced with the Greek “ο” (Unicode U+03BF), which are visually indistinguishable.
The mechanism of deception
After thorough analysis, we came to the conclusion that the copywriter used a script or program that allowed for quickly creating "unique" texts in large volumes. The program's algorithm works as follows:
➤ An invisible character %E2%80%AD is inserted every 1–4 characters in the text. Example: “Manometers” becomes “M%E2%80%ADano%E2%80%ADmeter%E2%80%ADs”.
➤ All Cyrillic letters “о” are replaced with Greek “ο”.
➤ The text is decoded using functions such as URLDecode (PHP) or decodeURI (JavaScript), or their equivalents.
➤ As a result, the text appears as “Manοmeters”, but shows 100% uniqueness according to plagiarism checkers like Candy-Content.
Why are we sure it's a script?
One copywriter wrote 800,000 characters of text with declared 100% uniqueness in 5 working days. Creating such a volume manually is practically impossible.
How to protect yourself?
To avoid becoming a victim of such deception, we recommend:
➤ Check the text using multiple uniqueness checkers — Candy-Content, PlagiarismDetector.
➤ Analyze the text in Notepad++ using regular expressions to detect non-Cyrillic characters.
➤ Manually enter phrases into Google if copying the text yields no results.
➤ Pay attention to the behavior of editors like Word, where underlined words may indicate a problem.
To protect yourself from deception, it is important to use various text-checking tools and carefully analyze its structure and sources.
Conclusion
Dishonest copywriters use complex methods to create the appearance of unique content. Scripts allow them to quickly generate large volumes of text that pass uniqueness checks but are actually plagiarism. Be careful and cautious when ordering texts for website promotion!
Good luck to everyone in creating quality content!
