What is Article Spinning?

Article spinning is the process of re-writing an article to create new “original” copies in an attempt to avoid duplicate content issues that can result in a penalty from search engines like Google when article marketing your website.

The idea is to write an article and then re-write it hundreds or even thousands of times to create different versions of the same article and then submit to hundreds or thousands of other websites. The pay-off for the person writing the article is that they will include links back to their own website within the text. In theory, these links will tell Google that they are very popular and push their website up the rankings for their chosen keywords.

It is possible to spin articles to create useful and unique “new” articles that can be submitted to other websites without fear of duplicate content. As you can imagine, this takes more time and the number of good quality versions you can produce manually is limited by how much you’re prepared to fry your brain trying to re-word the same thing over and over again. In it’s worst form, a spun article doesn’t have to make any sense at all and only needs to have a similar collection of words to the original article. This would be the “Black Hat” SEO version.

The trouble is that it’s not practical (or financially viable) to create several hundred good-quality versions of the same article. The solution to this has been article spinning software that will re-write your original article for you. Of course, being software, it’s not perfect and your beautifully-written original can end up with some unusual phrases normally heard from drunk “English-as-a-second-language” speakers with jet-lag!

An original sentence like…

“The cat leapt gracefully onto the table.”

… by re-write version #147 can easily turn into…

“The feline spring charmingly onto the slab.”

The nature of “Black Hat” spun articles is that they are not easy to read and really aren’t intended to be. Their sole purpose is to create a page of text that is broadly about the same topic as the original, to provide a vehicle for a link to another website.

Cheating? Yes.

Does it work? Yes, it can.

However, the downside is that article spinning is against the spirit of the internet and Google is still the sheriff in that town. Their recent algorithm updates are their latest step toward cleaning up the “riff-raff” that is muddying the waters of the internet. Spun articles will definitely be high on their agenda and after some research I’ve been doing recently, I think they’re near the bottom of the egg-timer.