The Shady Practice Of Spinning Articles To Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties

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Spinning articles isn't "shady." It's an appalling cynical tactic that obviously wouldn't even exist without the search engines' duplicate content filter - and search marketers trying to game the system by republishing the same thing over and over again without concern for provenance, authorial integrity or the best interest of users.

As you say, "[t]here are more intelligent ways to engage people." I'd go so far as to say "there are less offensive ways of insulting your readers' intelligence."

The amount of poorly written content on the web is just amazing. In order to please the search engines, you need to please actual human visitors. It's obvious when an article is "spun" because the wording just isn't natural. The search engines want to provide users with the best possible results and spun articles just won't cut it anymore.

Speaking as somebody who takes a lot of pride in his use of the English language I also found the concept of 'spinning' rather repulsive.

At first.

Upon using a spinner program and distributing a little content however, I realised it's just a really excellent way to produce a lot of unique content to build back-links.

The content is still readable if spun properly, and spun articles can still deliver the vital information that people are searching for.

You cannot rebuke this tactic on the grounds that it is ineffective. Feel free to rebuke it on the grounds of artistic integrity as a writer, however if you want to build a ton of strong back-links quickly it's a great method.

Sure it murders the language we've spent so long mastering, and yes I also find it slightly perturbing, but at the end of the day there are always going to be high quality written content and junk content to produce back links. I'm secure enough in the original and quality content I write for people to read to not be bothered by having to produce a shed load of trashy content to build links.

You make a lot of excellent points here. I just don't know if article spinning and other types of garbage content will ever leave us as long as incoming links remain vital to rankings and we have proof that, often, unethical practices actually DO work at achieving higher rankings, in spite of what Matt Cutts and Google's webmaster guidelines tell us. In other words, if Google can't plug the loopholes, there will always be people prepared to take advantage of them... and benefit from them.

How wonderfully refreshing to see such shabby practices wholeheartedly condemned.

I was trawling through one of my competitors' back links the other week and stumbled across a series of spun articles, some of which made me laugh. Somehow "search engine optimisation" had become "look engine optimisation". Gibberish.

Anyone who would choose to risk their professional reputation for a few extra short term bucks must lack self respect.

I hope the engines will soon be able to spot the lookalikes and drop the spun content and their embedded links from ther indices altogether.

Miriam, you're right, it does work, and sometimes SEO makes you do things to get results that as a marketer you don't like because you're not messaging and positioning things the way you'd really like. We can do better. But to some degree Google has sort of designed the incentives into the system that encourage this kind of thing, so I would place some blame there.

BTW, you might get a kick out of this parody spin formula article (I wrote it back when no one was following me so few have seen it):

www.coconutheadphones.com/googley-bing-yahoo-announces-something-really-important/

Great points on murdering the English language, and authenticity not translating to end reader (consumer) with spun content. (pls excuse the grammatical laziness)

Waste of time, cheap tactic that degrades every other above-board visibility effort and ultimately waters down real helpful conversion based content. Too much trash already out there, no need to add to it.

Flotsam and jetsam - Young Guns was on TV last night, great pull!

PS - 'intert', 4th paragraph from the end (I'd want someone to tell me, zero malice or fun-poking intended)

I really appreciate all the thoughtful comments being shared here.

Ewan - your example of spinning is extremely funny. A classic! Nothing like a 'look engine' to make a great impression!

Friendly Rory & Ted, I do understand the concept that marketers may feel forced by circumstances to do things they find weird or distasteful, but on the other hand, we each have a hand in making the rules. Google is only processing our data...not creating it. If no one was stopping this low, this wouldn't be an issue. I think by taking a higher road we are actually able to be part of the solution instead of the problem.

Chris - thanks for catching my typo. Corrected! :)

Thanks, everybody, for your comments.

Hello Miriam,
Thank you for this article, it was very interesting to read your opinion on spun articles. As a copywriter I do respin articles but I complete that in a bit different way. I usually just rewrite the main sense of whole sentenses, for example It was a great day and kids were playing in the gardern|The weather that day was really nice and the gadren was filled with kids and so on. I do agree though that adding synonims to specific words works not so great.
Caroline.

I don't think that it will take Google to figure out a way to recognize this. I'm pretty sure that Panda is doing a pretty good job at detecting this sort of thing and nullifying it.

I really don't use any article spinning software as it produces poor quality content. I know that some marketers spin articles just to produce a huge number of articles. But this idea is not good because once someone reads the articles and finds out that these are nonsense, they wouldn't click over to your site. I think it's much better to provide few quality articles rather than producing hundreds of poorly-written articles. Keep in mind that you are writing for people and not for search engines.

Thanks for your article.
I think it makes much more sense to write your own original articles. I have started my own website and to be honest, I have been too scared to hire an SEO company in case they start submitting dodgy articles under my company name. I personally would much rather do the work myself, submit good quality articles and do my online marketing slowly. It may take longer, but I won't be worrying about suddenly seeing a drop in my rankings.

Great article
It probably won't be very long at the rate Google is moving to develop metrics taking the total backlinks of each page, give the results a weighted average comparing pages using simular keywords.
With that info they'll compare the similarities in content of those pages with excessive backlinks then penalize accordingly. Once again another gaming tactic dealt with while leaving the legitimate hard working IM to continue providing a great search experience. Also Google's mission of providing a better search experience becomes more evident for all of us.

I see a lot of my competitors using spun articles just to get backlinks. And when you try to READ the articles... they don't make a lick of sense. Complete non-sense there's no way to get anything from.

But I will say, they are stomping me at Google simply because they have hundreds and hundreds of backlinks from their spun articles. So while spun articles provide no value to anyone trying to read them, they do seem to give a benefit (to my competitors, at least). ;-)

Miriam, I agree with what you're saying, But I feel like writing good articles isn't enough. I can write good, quality content all day long but that doesn't mean people will see it. What do you suggest then for getting Google to rank us high by doing everything the legitimate way?