In this digital marketing era, content marketing has become one of the most popular ways to promote your services or products over the internet. People are publishing information via blogs, podcasts, vlogs, FB live sessions and much more. But still, the most powerful channel to promote your business goes through via writing content for your websites, guest posts, web 2.0 sites, PBNs and press releases. This leads to the need of tons of content that can be posted on websites and people try article spinning software to overcome the need of fresh and unique articles.

From school days we are spinning or try to spin the content to write project reports so that we can achieve good grades in assignments. We couldn’t copy the exact same lines from somebody else’s project for obvious reasons hence we used to replace the word from the original document to its synonyms. A simple sentence like “High-efficiency solar panels convert direct and indirect sunlight into electricity so they function on cloudy days.” can be written in several forms:

“High-efficiency solar panels transform direct and indirect sunlight into electrical energy, so they work even on overcast days.”

“Solar Energy panels with high-efficiency change the direct and indirect sun rays into electrical energy, so they perform even on cloudy days.”

“High-efficiency PV systems convert direct and indirect sunlight into electrical power, so they function even on non-sunny days."

Every one of those words may have hundreds of possibilities and can be written in several ways while communicating the same message. A similar thing happens in article marketing when a bad SEO person tries to generate tons of unique content. The more posts you need, the writers you have to hire for content and the more money you have to spend. And the solution to this problem is – Article Spinning. There are several articles spinning software in the market which is quite cheaper in terms of cost and has the ability to generate hundreds of copy of unique content from the single article. Needless to say, this technique has become a popular way of building hundreds if not thousands of backlinks.

Types of Article Spinning:

Spinning articles has become a new trend among spammy bloggers and black-hat SEO marketers. There are numerous ways by which you may spin the content:

  • Word Level: Using synonyms to replace the original word. Also changing the order of the words mentioned in a sentence.
  • Sentence Level: Changing the order of the sentences and words.
  • Paragraph Level: Number of paragraphs are adjusted and their position is  interchanged with each other to make the article unique
  • Article Level: Using all above technique mentioned above and adding variation in the article.

However, article spinning using software is considered as Black Hat SEO technique and can seriously hurt your website SERP’s position.

Why is Article Spinning considered a bad practice?

Reason No. 1: Google love fresh and regular content.

Search Engines love new and fresh content that goes over the internet on the regular basis. Websites that post updated content in a timely manner gets higher authority on SERPs.

Article spinning puts the purpose of contextual SEO down the drain. In this scenario query like ‘Things to do in Nepal’ would return one original article and 100s of other clones of the article which provides nothing valuable to the searcher. It means you are doing SEO only for the bots and not for the humans which are a violation of Google SEO Guidelines.

Also, Google has updated its algorithm and it can detect spun articles. With the Penguin update, Google has penalized several low-quality content directories such as Ezine, Hubpages etc. These sites no longer pass any link juice to your money websites.

Reason No. 2: Most Spinning Software provide unreadable versions of the articles

Article spinning degrades the quality of the original article. Even a masterpiece copied from the site like Forbes or Wall Street Journal becomes a mess after being through the spinner a few dozen times. It replaces the original word with synonyms and jumbles up several lines in a paragraph making it unreadable for humans.

There are many SEO practitioners out there who use a cheap quality article spinner to post the same article hundred times over the internet. Some won’t even modify the article to make sense which generates a negative user experience.

Reason No. 3: In many cases, it is considered as unethical.

Most of the times, businesses spin off content from their competitor’s websites and make it publish it as their own content. This practice clearly violates the Google’s Duplicate Content Policy. When Google displays SERPs it definitely doesn’t want to show its users 20 variants of similar content. Google has always taken harsh steps for thin content by devaluing links from blogs, web 2.0 sites and article directories.

Reason No. 4: Think about the experience you are providing to users

Article spinning is nothing but saying the similar thing in many different ways. A spun article doesn’t provide any value to the community and makes the internet a content junkyard. Though spinning article changes the word and sentences but doesn’t change the basic idea behind that article. And search engines can easily detect this. With the introduction of artificial intelligence and natural language processing techniques search engines can learn the perspective behind the article and easily detect low-quality crappy content.

Also, nowadays people are putting their focus on social media sites and search engines actually collect social signals to value your websites. No one will like share or comment on the content which is garbage.

Answering to the question – Is Article Spinning worth or not?

I am not completely against any technique that helps you to increase your rankings on search engines but in my perception, it is always about the quality and the value you are bringing to the table. I have personally tried several free spinning tools and a few paid ones but it always resulted as synonyms thrown at my face in the name of unique content.

Spamming and practicing Black Hat SEO is not everything to rank well. Your focus should be making quality content that provides some value to your users. Instead of wasting your precious time churning out variants of one piece of text you may focus on coming up with something original high-quality content. Make something unique that is also useful for the internet. Practicing Bad SEO techniques may provide you profit for short terms but they are not at all useful in the long run. And every Black Hat SEO practitioner knows this.

The Advice:

If you are really stuck with the content designing part and looking for methods I can advise you few things:

  • Hire An In-house Content Writer Team: In this way, the result will be more humane. Also, you will have more control over the team and can manage them according to your business needs.
  • Use Freelancers: You may hire writers from Upwork, Freelancer.com, FB groups and several SEO forums.
  • Do-It Yourself: I have learned this technique from the book ‘Zero Excuses’, written by Mr. Gabriel Machuret. If this is your business then no one can write about it better than you. Find some time spare time and do it yourself.
  • Use Article Spinners but tweak them before publishing: If you lack all of the above-mentioned resources then you may use article spinners make sure that your read and modify to sustain the flow of the article.

In the end, we would like to say article spinning insults your readers’ intelligence and your business should always be above to that tactic. Writer about your business, document the process of building your business, what have you tried that worked and also what not. Trust me people would love to read such stuff rather than half baked version of the article they have already read somewhere else.