Article Spinning

What is Article Spinning?

Article spinning is a black-hat SEO tactic that involves taking an existing piece of content and rewriting it with the help of software to produce many slightly different versions that can be listed as ‘new’ copy.

This approach is used to generate high volumes of content cheaply and often involves publishing across many different sites or building links without going to the effort of writing original material each time.

Because of how content is heavily plagiarised through article spinning, it’s known as a highly risky and controversial practice that most SEO professionals steer clear of.

How Article Spinning Works

The mechanics of article spinning point to why it’s such a problem. The tools that are used to spin articles essentially swap words for synonyms and shuffle sentence structures around.

In practice, this would mean that the phrase “the quick brown fox” could be spun into “the fast tan fox.”

When undertaken at a larger scale to rewrite a 2,000-word article, the tool can generate text that’s technically different from the original but adds no new information for readers and often appears to be nonsense.

This doesn’t always matter to those publishing articles that have been spun. The point here is to trick search engines into seeing unique content where, in reality, the same ideas are being regurgitated in a variety of barely coherent ways.

A Relic of the Past

Article spinning gained some success in the early days of SEO, where the practice could create mass-produced content for low-quality guest posts, private blog networks, and article directories, all as a means of building backlinks quickly.

The strategy achieved some early success and briefly became common practice. However, Google quickly caught up to the strategy, and its ability to detect low-value and duplicated content helped to prevent article spinning from diluting the quality of content online.

Today, most cases of article spinning merely lead to a waste of time for the perpetrator at best and the prospect of a Google penalty at worst.

Diluted Content

One of the bigger issues at play is that article spinning is merely contributing to the proliferation of content that nobody would ever want to read online.

Google’s policing of quality means that content is rightfully rewarded when it’s deemed to serve a purpose for its target audience. The search engine will also habitually demote material that’s been created with the sole purpose of gaming rankings.

Even in rare cases when spun articles slip through Google’s detection, they rarely earn natural links, typically fail to build trust, and won’t earn any conversions from readers because the content is simply too unreadable to make sense of.

Key Differences with Rewriting

It’s worth highlighting that article spinning has nothing to do with rewriting your own content, and you won’t get penalised by Google if you decide to freshen up your old articles by taking key points and covering topics in a more in-depth way.

It’s also common practice to republish the same article on another site with permission. This is called “syndication” and is a recognised practice when carried out in a transparent way with the right canonical signals.

Spinning is different because it’s used to deceive while containing no value for readers whatsoever. If you’re looking to improve your SEO and find yourself attempting to trick Google into thinking your content has value, you’re probably better off reassessing your strategy.