As you very well know, duplicate content is unacceptable online, especially after the Panda Update.
So Here Comes Article Spinning…
Rather than writing unique and relevant articles week in and week out, some SEOs resort to what is known as ‘article spinning‘. Article spinning refers to the practice of putting articles through a software (called an article spinner) that ‘spins’ the article and churns out various new articles with varying degrees of uniqueness.
The article spinner uses what is known as ‘spintax’ to make the article unique. Spintax is basically a database of synonyms and related words that the software uses to replace the words in your article, thus creating unique variations of them.
It sounds like an efficient way to create unique content, doesn’t it? But as Joey shows us, most of the time those articles turn out like this:
Source: http://fyeahfriendsgifs.tumblr.com/tagged/season%2010[1]
Oh, and article spinning is NOT content marketing, regardless of what your coffeeshop SEO says. Here’s a great article on the downsides of article spinning.
As Zac Grace points out, most high quality blogs will not accept spun articles. Most likely, you can only place spun articles on article directories. However, even the better ones such as Ezine Articles don’t take too kindly to spun articles.
So you’re left with only article directories that aren’t human edited. Google has greatly devalued such directories and you probably have to submit to hundreds or even thousands of them to see an effect.
Furthermore, there is no branding value.
Most of these articles are created not for human readers, but to game search engines. If a real life human prospect actually reads them, it’s quite likely they will be put off.
Not great for brand building, is it?
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not against black hat tactics for ethical reasons, mostly for business ones.
If you are going to spend hours spinning articles and disseminating them to low quality article directories, why not just spend that time doing more research for a guest post on a high quality blog?
It will probably have a more positive effect anyway.
What do you think? Are you getting still getting great results from spinning articles?
