A freelance writing gig gave me advice that got my account flagged

I was working with a client who told me to rewrite articles by just swapping out a few words and reordering paragraphs. I did that for 3 months on Upwork until one of my clients reported me for plagiarism and the platform suspended my account for 14 days. Has anyone else had a client push shady shortcuts that backfired on you?

2 comments

2 Comments

ericp6721d ago

Oh man, that sucks but honestly it's not surprising. I had a similar thing happen with a client who wanted me to spin blog posts for their SEO scheme (basically the same garbage, swap some synonyms and call it a day). After about 2 months of that, Google smacked their whole site and my bylines got flagged in Google Search Console too. The worst part is these clients act like it's totally normal and you're the one being paranoid for questioning it.

miller.avery20d ago

Wait, I feel like I should point out something here. Google Search Console doesn't actually flag individual bylines or authors. It flags the whole site or specific pages for violations, not your personal name attached to a post. So if your bylines got flagged, it was probably the URLs those articles lived on that got hit, not your name in the byline tag. Still sucks for your portfolio and reputation though, clients definitely act like black hat tricks are just standard business. And yeah, spinning articles is basically plagiarism with a thesaurus, Google has been pretty clear about that for years now.