I quite often outsource articles for my niche sites.

I read or skim them before accepting – partly to make sure they’re well enough written, partly for the kind of awkward situation I’ve just encountered.

I use iWriter for most of my outsourcing. The quality is good for the price, the speed is good and I’m normally satisfied with the result or I can tweak it in a couple of minutes to be a decent standard.

Today was interesting…

I’d asked for a re-write on an article.

The writer was fairly new to the site and had a decent rating from the handful of other articles they’d written but the article they’d originally sent was basically written to include the keywords rather than relate to the topic.

Nothing unusual about that.

Sometimes that kind of article is OK but this was about a very specific topic and it just wasn’t up to scratch.

A few hours later, the re-write came back.

The first warning signal was the length of the article.

I’d asked for 300 words.

On iWriter, I’m used to the word length being more than I ask for. That’s in contrast to a lot of professional article writers who seem to have a word count running in their brain and will deliver an article within a handful of the words requested. So with a professional writer, it would be quite normal to get within 5 or 10 words of the count.

On iWriter, it’s less formulaic.

In the recent batch of 300 word articles I’ve had ones with around 450 words and the average is about 350. Which is a pleasant bonus.

But this re-write was over 600 words.

Double the word count is highly unusual.

Then I started reading the article.

I’ll usually read the first paragraph and then – depending on that – skim the rest of the article if the first paragraph reads OK or reject it if it’s full of errors.

This read well but sounded kind-of familiar.

So I skimmed a few of the other paragraphs and came across a phrase that sounded like one I use.

My writing style is quite unique. My voice comes out and one phrase screamed at me “you wrote that, not them!”

Which is odd as outsourced articles at iWriter are run through Copyscape as a matter of course.

But computers can make mistakes.

So I typed the phrase into Google, surrounding it with quotes.

One result came back.

Just one for the 7 word phrase.

Plus one more in the list of other similar results – my article again but in a different article directory.

Just my article out of potentially millions

Written and published on EzineArticles in September 2012.

Hmm.

Definitely not good.

So I checked a couple of other phrases and it was definitely my article, word for word.

Right down to the comment about a sabre tooth tiger purring.

All this has probably taken longer to explain here than it did to track down.

But it’s a fair warning if you’re outsourcing articles – check!

Don’t rely on computers 100% as they’re fallible, just like humans are.

And, of course, if it’s a site like this one, write your own articles.

They don’t take long to write, your voice will come through and your visitors will relate to that.