Hey everyone.
For those that know me as a contributor on ZK’s great site, you’ll know that I love courting controversy and debate with my posts. In fact, I have a great article coming out soon about paid links, so keep an eye out for that one in the near future. Today, however, I’d like to discuss something that isn’t so much as controversial as it is illuminating. This is also a mistake that I have personally discovered I’m making.
Background
My very favorite method of back-link building for any SEO project I undertake is article marketing. I swear by article marketing. I love article marketing. My favorite SEO software package has a fantastic article submitter and content spinner that has made my article submission process far easier than it has in the past, and I would say that article directory submission is really the ‘bread and butter’ of my back-linking procedure.
I know the rules about duplicate content (see my last post), and have always felt secure in my mass directory submissions because I follow a comprehensive article spinning protocol that I always felt protected me from Google figuring out that the dozens of articles I had distributed into the world were, in fact, the same article spun a hundred times over.
Today, I learned that part of my content spinning protocol was deeply flawed.This flaw is going to force me to totally re-consider how I spin my content. Here’s how it happened:
I generally employ two methods when spinning article content. One method is to go through the article sentence by sentence and replace each sentence with a spun variant that conveys the same meaning. The second method is to go through word by word and spin each word into synonyms. This method is far more common because:
A. It can be utilized by automatic article spinners armed with a thesaurus database and
B. It’s a lot easier to to if you are manually spinning
Unfortunately, it’s also vulnerable to low content spin percentages. When I spin all the possible words in an article, I rarely find that the spun content percentage gets much higher than 50%. Here’s the real kicker though, and the thing I was overlooking: Due to Google’s Stop Words, that number is actually a LOT lower than I thought it was. Here’s why:
Google Stop Words
Google’s Stop Words are a list of words that Google ignores when caching and indexing a page because they are just so common. Google is able to speed up its algorithm by ignoring these words when reading a page’s content. A comprehensive list of Google’s Stop Words can be found here.
See any of your favorite spin words on that list? I know I did. One of my most common spins is the usage of ‘usually’ and generally’. The two words are {fundamentally|basically} synonyms and I {generally|usually} use them interchangeably. Unfortunately, the word ‘usually’ is on the list of Google Stop Words! This means that every I used the word ‘generally’ in an article and spun it into ‘usually’, Google didn’t see the content as spun at all. As far as Google is concerned, the two sentences that those words are in are identical!
If you have many of Google’s Stop Words in your spun content, your actual spin percentage may be far lower than you thought. If your content spinner told you 50%, could you actually be at 30%? 20%? Are you using a spun variation on your blog? Your website? For your article back-links?
The more times you used a spun article variation, the most chances you have to trip off some internal Google alarm. If you lose indexing of a few article back-links, the world isn’t going to end. If you posted an article to your main website and then submitted spun versions to the article directories, however, you might have cause to worry. I know I’m guilty.
Moral of the Story
Study the list. Become familiar with the Stop Words and don’t waste your time spinning them. If you DO spin them, account for their percentage to subtracted from the overall spun percentage. Or just play it safe and spin sentence by sentence. It’ll take a little longer, and you won’t be able to use your automatic content spinner. But you’ll be sure you’ll never have to worry about this kind of crap. Oh, and was the garbage written by your automatic content spinner REALLY coherent anyway?
Image Credit: Wanda Abbing
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