How do I check a content website for copied or low-quality articles?

Start with the articles that matter. Ask for the list of pages ranked by visits and by income, and read the top ones as a customer would. Is the information correct and specific, or generic and padded? Does it read as if one person with knowledge wrote it, or as if it was stitched together?

Then test originality. Take sentences from a sample of articles and search for them in quotation marks, or run the text through a plagiarism checker. Look for duplicate pages inside the site itself, and for images that appear to be borrowed. Ask the seller how articles were commissioned, what the writers were told and whether any text was produced by software.

Ask for the paper trail: writer agreements, invoices, and who owns the text. If writers were paid a flat fee, find out whether the transfer of ownership is written down. Your lawyer can tell you whether it is. Finally, look at what happened to traffic over time. A sharp drop after a search engine update can point to quality problems that have not been fixed. Ask what was changed in response, and who will do that work after you take over. Keep notes of what you find on each page so you can compare sites later.

Key takeaways

• Read the highest-traffic articles first.
• Search quoted sentences from a sample to catch copied text.
• Ask for writer agreements and invoices to see who owns the articles.