Of all the dirty tricks in the unscrupulous SEO trick bag, there is one that viewers and the general public probably despise most – spinning content.
The Idea Behind Spinning
For those of you innocent enough to have never come across the concept of spinning, what it essentially is using a piece of automated software in order to take and spin articles into a new format. This means in short that the a program will look at an article you give it and will then replace particular words for synonyms. So in other words the sentence:
The best thing about water balloons is that they create just enough water to shock someone, but not enough to ruin anything.
Becomes:
The greatest thing with water balloons is that they make only enough water to surprise somebody, though not enough to damage something.
These spin engines then allow someone to write one article which takes them half an hour, and put it on hundreds of sites like e-zine articles in order to get back links. The truly evil webmasters meanwhile will go one step further and steel someone else’s work in order to spin articles on e-zine or even I order to populate their own site.
Thus they can flood Google over a very short period and theoretically climb the ranks to get to the top spots in the SERPs.
The Reality
However the reality is quite different, and the problem is that no spin engine is able to create articles that are as good as hand written ones. One problem is that most spin engines make hundreds of articles based on a single source, meaning they have to substitute all kinds of dubious synonyms.
For instance you’ll probably get a few versions of your sentence that read something like this:
The nicest item with aqua bubbles is that they produce nearly enough H2O to scare person, only not adequate to destroy items.
Hang on… that doesn’t quite make sense…
And the other problem with the way they work is that even if they only made one copy of each article, they won’t be context sensitive enough in order to work in every instance.
For example the word ‘have’ can be substituted for the word ‘own’ right? I have that, I own that… Except when you change the context to ‘Have you been there?’ you end up with ‘Own you been there?’. Again… your English teacher would wince.
The Repercussions
And the repercussions of this are bad for you. The only person who benefits from spinning is the person selling the spin software. Here are some of the reasons not to spin.
– First of all if Google notices you’ve spun your content (and it may well as even the best spin engines tend to leave some duplicate content) you will end up being penalized and dropping down the SERPs.
Even sites like e-zine are realizing the danger of having such nonsense on their network and as a result they are removing spun articles and penalizing those who use them. Quite simply Google can now spot this rubbish, so it’s not going to end up being seen.
– At the same time, even if your site does stay at the top of the SERPs and you do get that traffic – that traffic will be practically worthless to you. As soon as people visit your site and see it’s full of nonsense they will leave and that means they aren’t going to click on your adverts or buy your products.
Just getting people to come to your site isn’t good enough, you need to keep them there. In fact it’s better to have 10 people come to your site and actually look around and read than it is to have 1,000 people come to your site and not spend any time there at all. The same goes for putting this spun content on eZine – no one’s going to read it so no one will get to the link at the bottom pointing to your site.
– And this means you will also get no repeat traffic, no links from people sharing your content on forums and no ‘likes’ on Facebook. Your content will be junk, and so it will be left to sink and die. And the same again goes for spinning your article submissions – no one is going to reproduce this content and give you those crucial free links because it’s useless.
– Meanwhile when people see your articles on e-zine when they’re looking for something useful, they won’t just leave; they’ll be genuinely angry you wasted their time. They won’t be very prone to buy anything from you or to click on your links, and they may well blacklist your site in your head – it’s not worth the shot to your reputation that you take when someone sees your site as spammy and no good. And if you go the whole hog and use the spun content on your own website… well let’s not even go there.
Oh yeah, and then there’s the fact that it’s immoral…
18 comments
Nice post about get quality backlinks and better PR in search engine because content is that kind of thing which will decide your site/blog quality.
Spun articles are easy to detect; however, even if they are considered to be one of the dirty tricks in SEO, they are still rampant and many people still use spinning as a method to gain backlinks from sites such as ezine. There are plugins or services even offered in the net regarding spinning articles quickly.
One may get away with spun articles, but the reader will clearly see if the content makes sense or not.
@Felicia: I don’t think EzineArticles would accept a spun article easily. Other ezines / article directories might do that.
I mostly see spun articles being used in places where there is no moderation / editing. Web 2.0 link wheels, private blog networks (many of them are dead thankfully) etc. where there are no readers to complain that the quality of posts is poor.
Hi Jeet,
Thanks for clearing that up. I know Ezine would not accept a spun article very easily, but there are still some articles that do get past their radar. Actually, some of the people I know who submit to Ezine sometimes submit an article that is spun just to see if it gets published, and guess what, it gets published!
@Felicia: That someone did a great job at spinning. I agree ezine is not perfect.
Morally, it is wrong to use someone else’s work for your own benefit without permission. Just like stealing.
@Becca: To be fair to people doing spinning; some of them do write the seed article themselves.
where is the continuity of this article?
it stopped to the: ” One problem is that mo….”
where is the next page?
Thanks for pointing this out…fixed it:)
@Euro: Thanks for reporting that.
@ZK: Quick fix 🙂
Dear admin.
Nice article and I am agree with your article.
Good post, Jeet.
Google and the other search engines are pretty smart these days. Don’t try to outsmart them… please do not spin articles. Sit down and spend some time to write something genuine!
I think spinning article is not a good way for providing content for your site. I do agree with this article that one is making a mistake if he / she spinning content. One should now give the unique and rich content for grabbing more traffic after some updates from Google.
Oh, I hate spun articles, they are not only difficult to read but they are also meaningless! Don’t spin, just write your own unique articles please. 🙂
Spun articles are very easily detected and if not then it is surely understood by the user by reading the spun version.
Most affiliate marketers start out with the product information given to them from the company they are trying to market for, then they rewrite the information for their sites. That’s spinning too, so if you’ve ever built a site to sell a product or service for someone else, then basically you’ve just spun their content to make money.
@Jake: There is a BIG difference between rewriting and spinning. For most part rewriting is not as bad as spinning is.
If you think about it, there are more than 100 newspapers that report nearly the ‘same’ stories everyday, but everyone has a different take on the events (I know some of them just copy the story from AP/AFP).
Finally, someone comes up against spun articles. I wonder how many programmers made money off those spinning software. I hope they’re out of business now.