The Uniquefier Plugin – Black Hat Trickery

Marketing tools are great but when they are used to fool the search engines, they generally don’t pay off in the long run. The Uniquefier plugin adds code to your blog posts that fool the search engines into believing that your scraped content is unique content. You need to understand how it works to understand how it can hurt you in the long run.

When we first started coding web sites (way back in the 90’s), it was necessary to use special codes called ASCII to display some of the less used characters on the keyboard such as apostrophes, quotes, etc. As browsers became more sophisticated, this coding became unnecessary. However, the new browsers are also able to continue reading this code in case you should encounter an older website that uses it. For a complete list of these codes you can go to:

http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

Uniquefier works by adding ASCII codes to your blog posts that are unnecessary but that can be read by the browser and display the same text to the human eye. The coding only fools the search engine into believing that the post is unique.

If you use Copyscape to check your pages for uniqueness, you can easily see that Copyscape sees them as unique once the plugin is activated. So what’s the catch?

Uniquefier is on its third version as of this writing. The reason the developers keep releasing new versions is not to improve the plugin so much as to change the way it works because it becomes non-functional very quickly. That’s because it is a very simple search and replace function that you could perform manually in a program like Word if you wanted to. This causes it to leave a very traceable footprint.

In the Version 2 video on the sales page, you can see that they were using a code for a “soft hyphen” throughout the page. This code (­) was being embedded hundreds of times on each page. So, it was an easy one to spot and flag by Copyscape and the search engines.

In the new Version 3, they are searching and replacing bullets, quotes, apostrophes, ellipsis and other similar punctuation with the ASCII codes. These codes can be seen in the bottom box of the link above to the ASCII code web site.

As Copyscape and the search engines realize what is happening, they will de-index the sites using the plugin and could decide to ban them as well.

So, now that you understand this plugin, use it with extreme caution. You have to ask yourself if “cheating” the system is really worth it in the long run. Remember, it’s only a matter of time before it stops working and eventually, the developers will run out of codes to use.

I personally believe this plugin is not worth the risk. In fact, I think these guys are just out for a run for the money. A good programmer would have taken the time to create a program that would work much better than this.