Article Spinning For SEO 

I’m writing this article in response to clickTRUE’s blog post on article spinning being bad and their advice for people to NOT do it. clickTRUE is an online marketing company and subsidiary of SPH Magazines, that was started by the wonderful guys who founded Hardwarezone.

But first, what is article spinning? It’s the use of article spinners to re-write the content of an article, blog post, etc. to create copies that are seen as different from the original. Is it bad? Not, entirely. Can it be used legitimately? Yes.

Contrary to what Shi Ming had written, Google doesn’t usually penalize a website for duplicate content. If it did, article directories (e.g. GoArticles) and press release websites (e.g. Prlog.org) would be the first to get penalized. What Google actually does is to omit duplicate content that it feels doesn’t add any value to the original piece - there’s no penalty.

Don’t believe? Watch this explanation by Greg Grothaus, Google’s Software Engineer for Search Quality.

How to Use Article Spinning Legitimately
Article spinning is NOT only used on plagiarized content. You can also spin your own articles.

It’s no secret that some of the ways to obtain backlinks for SEO are from article directories, press release websites and blogs. But what if in addition to mere backlinks, I want exposure for my article, which (hopefully) in turn, result in clicks to my website? A published article on authority sites like EzineArticles almost always get a favourable ranking, especially for low competition, longtail keywords.

What if I want to use the same content for submission to the hundreds of article directories out there for maximum SEO benefit …I can’t be writing a totally unique article for each directory, can I? Of course, some article directories do require in the Editorial Guidelines that the submitted articles be unique.

This is where article spinning can be used, i.e. to re-write my articles into unique copies so that they will be accepted by the Editors and also indexed by Google. It’s not illegal, it’s just a smarter way of doing things.

Writing Unique Articles
But what is defined as unique? Ideally, it should be able to pass Copyscape, although, a 75%-80% uniqueness should get you through Google’s duplicate filters. 

There are quite advanced article spinners out there that not only lets you “change/move some parts” of articles, but also spin entire sentences or paragraphs. Some even have user-submitted, built-in synonyms that are far more intelligent than the traditional use of thesaurus.

All you need to do is copy-and-paste your article as unformatted text and add in the synonyms (the common syntax is usually pipes and curlies) until the uniqueness count is above 75%. Then with a click of a button, the spinner is able to generate hundreds of copies from the original.

In summary, using such tools is not always bad depending on how you use them. A smart SEO is able to use them to his/her advantage, of course, given due consideration to search engine rules and guidelines.

Finally, a little bit of automation (you’d be suprise with the type of tools available out there) benefits everyone because it lowers the costs of implementation, which savings can be passed on to your clients.