One reason for spinning is to expand the keyword reach of your article.

Spinning can mean more keywords are used by your article, so those searching for different keywords, which may not exist in the original articles, may have a better chance of finding your material.

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Another reason is that some article sites will not list or will not allow links in articles found elsewhere on the net. They run your article through copyscape and if they dont find a match, you can get the full benefits of their service. Article site's love unique content and are doing more and more to get it.

Unique content is king, that's why.

+1 what Jmac said.

zannix,

I agree with your questions and thoughts, but I also see the issues about article sites not wanting to publish the same exact articles that are on other article sites.

However, if we expand your questions to all the chatter over the years about duplicate content on a website, they do have merit.

Even if we look at the basics of eCommerce, the idea of having to rewrite (or spin) every products description is ridiculous. It could also present some legal issues if the description or specs get altered in such a way they are no longer valid.

Likewise news articles that are syndicated, or other RSS feeds. Rewriting, spinning, swapping synonyms, etc., all carry legal risk if the content is altered in a way that the meaning is changed.

Additionally, many RSS and other syndication feeds do not give you PLR rights, or any rights other than simple republication.

If you are pulling content from article directories, then you need to review their terms very carefully. While there are several article services that do give you PLR rights where you can claim authorship and spin/modify the article in any way. But, some article services honor the original author's copyright and you can not alter the content nor claim authorship.

We build WordPress websites for the business community as well as for ourselves and also on spec to sell directly. We have been using the leading drip feed mechanism with over 20 feeds for several years now and we do not modify any of the incoming feeds in any way other than to tweak the keywords being used to pull critical content from the feeds.

Instead of investing a lot of time into creating a few, specific, keyword intensive pages, we concentrate on critically selecting the keywords that will pull in content rich in our keywords.

The advantage being that once you have a site's drip feed tweaked to a decent level, that site will continue to pull in keyword optimized content from (in our case) over 20 leading sources. Now on the downside it can take up to three months of tweaking in some cases to get to that optimized point. But, once you get to that point all it takes is occasional monitoring and updating and if you are using the various SEO plugins for word press that also automate that half of the work, you will start reporting (literally) thousands of pages indexed on Google.

Check your sites indexed pages by simply entering "site:<yoururl.com> and you will see the number of pages indexed at that time on Google. Now, check several times over several days as it is possible to have it report a high number, then an hour later a low number. I believe this is related to Google re-indexing, updating or making changes to their system.

If all the claims about duplicate content were actually true, wouldn't one expect that Google would drop those pages from the index? But, if they do, then they would have to drop pages from virtually every news site, eCommerce site, etc.

Woah Jmac, thanks! That's a real eye opener. I've never tried to submit my article to more than 2 or 3 sites until now, but I guess that's the problem I'd have to face sooner or later.

But there are auto-approve article submission sites as well, aren't there?

Also, thanks to Selmicro for elaborating his viewpoint, although I must admit I don't completely understand all of it - I still stick to the simple SEO techniques (set up as many backlinks to your page as possible, preferably quality backlinks).

This is why I'm only interested in whether Google gives credit to links which are found on non-unique content page (in terms of boosting your ranking position). If it does, I see no reason not to post the exact same article to as many article submission sites as you can. They're all PR0 anyway.

They just don't - the statement isn't true.

That may be the consensus of opinion among "internet marketers in general", but it came right out of the "urban myth school of internet marketing".

The consensus of opinion among people who are actually making a full-time living as article marketers is the exact opposite.

And if you read any or all of the threads just like this recent one you'll see them all explaining why.

There are lots of them, and they're doing that here regularly.

There are three main reasons for people not understanding this subject.

The first is the "syndrome" discussed in threads like this current one in which some people attribute SEO benefits to the fact they've spun their articles, rather than realising that they could in fact have had exactly the same benefits without spinning them.

The second is that there's a very widespread misunderstanding about the difference between "duplicate content" and "syndicated content".

The third is that there's a substantial industry of people selling spinning software and services who have a direct financial incentive for successive generations of newbie internet marketers to remain confused about it.

If you ask successful marketers who have experience of article marketing both with spinning and without spinning and can honestly compare the two (without their reason for discussing it being that they're selling/promoting anything!), you'll have absolutely no difficulty learning the truth.

And it's not that "unique content is king".

Yes. I'm making a living (partly) from them, and so are countless others here.

Because backlinks from "article submission sites" have no value at all, by comparison. People like to blame the "Panda update" for that, but this is nonsense. Article directory backlinks have been close-to-useless, in linkjuice terms, for at least two years before that. The Panda update was only the last nail in the already-closed coffin-lid of "article directory marketing".

These are non-context-relevant, PR-0 backlinks. That's about as low as you can get, in linkjuice terms.

Even a year before the Panda update, the authors of many of the standard SEO textbooks were pointing out (at length and in detail) that one would typically need something between 50,000 and 100,000 of those backlinks (no exaggeration!) to confer the same linkjuice as that from one backlink on a page of a relevant authority-site.

It's true that after that, the Panda update did then devalue the article directories a lot further, but nobody knows exactly how much (not even their owners, who have understandably been commenting on it so much in public), and what that number's grown to now, as a result. It might be 200,000; it might be 300,000; who cares?

The point is that these backlinks are barely worth having.

That isn't "article marketing" at all, it's just "amassing bulk backlinks of the lowest quality and least relevance imaginable".

It's nothing to do with whether the article to which they're attached has been "spun". It's because they're not relevant backlinks, as are those on pages to which articles are syndicated.

I strongly advise anyone wishing to understand this subject to ignore entirely the comments of anyone recommending "unique" articles - they've misunderstood the whole thing (typically but not always because they've confused "duplicate content" with "syndicated content").

Article directories do not require previously unpublished content, and the linkjuice value of any given backlink on any given page of the web is not somehow, magically, going to be improved by being attached to content that hasn't been published before rather than to content that has (now that really would be a bizarre and inexplicable thing, wouldn't it?! ). This is one part of the reason why successful article marketers always stress the importance of not submitting articles to directories without publishing them on your own site first. Anything else is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what "duplicate content" is.

On all of these subjects, the two different groups of (i) "internet marketers in general (who typically repeat nonsense based on urban myths)" and (ii) "people actually making a living from article marketing (who have typically tested and proven many of these things for themselves)", have almost diametrically opposed points of view.

There are reasons for that, and they're significant ones.

Intending article marketers have to decide by whose beliefs they want to be influenced, and should choose wisely. Otherwise they can waste hundreds of hours doing entirely unnecessary and illogical things which can't be of any real benefit to their businesses. And end up back here 6 months later (like so many) starting off threads with titles like "Is Article Marketing Dead?". Have you ever noticed how almost ALL the people who start off those threads have been either "spinning" or using "auto-submission software"? There's a reason for that, and it isn't "coincidence".

In my two years of writing over 800 articles and submitting them, I can honestly say that spinning is not worth the effort. I notice absolutely no difference in CTR's or search engine rankings when my articles are spun.....

JSD

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Hey Zannix,

It comes down to what Google is here for.

"To Serve The Most Relevant High Quality Information for the Searcher"

Google is not going to show 10 listing of the same thing. It will take that article from a place it sees at the most authoritative and then get some different ones to give you the best results.

We spin them because then we can take all 10 positions on page 1 by having 10 "different" articles.

Now you can either buy from me ... or me!

I think spinning to at least 50% uniqueness is a great CYA move because syndication is cool but I have a feeling Google may draw a stiffer line on what is syndication and just plain copy pasting all over the internet, which may hurt the backlinks gained from doing that. Just keep things at least mostly original as much and often as possible and follow Google's TOS and you will never have anything to worry about.

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This is an interesting debate, but dare I say a convoluted one. There appears to be a number of contradicting absolute truths, which has always bedeviled the world. I say this without becoming a philosophical nut case. One thing is assured- what you hold as an absolute reality, has a way of becoming a mirage in the not too distant future.

Nonetheless, I will indulge myself by adding my 2cent contribution to the ensuing debate. The point is this- Could we all stop spending time and energy focused on Google or SEO for that matter. Let’s take it back to what the internet was originally about, which is the sharing of information, made feasible through the interconnection of people.


I am of the opinion, that all our focus, should be on creating quality content on your site(s), and keeping it real, by employing a strategy that connects with other themed sites. If you can, extend this process offline by connecting and creating the required buzz, with people that matter in your sphere of discourse.



I may be stating the obvious perhaps, but sometimes it needs restating.

I'm going to try an AMR blast without spun content and see if it works, after all the information on here about why it doesn't matter.

The last one I did with a site I have took me to number 1 from page 2, but it was spun.

It will be fantastic if I don't need to waste time spinning.

I'll take your word Alexa, not because you're an expert in your field (as there are many others who are very good with SEO, and have a different viewpoint on the subject), but because common sense tells me so.

One thing that I will still cling on for a while, however, is that these PR0 links actually can help me with ranking, if I gather enough of them and if my competitors backlinks are **** as well.

I'm on trial with SenukeX, so why not nuke the heck out of everything, it only takes a click.

Kind Regards,
Zannix

Before you spin your next article, think about the poor people who have to read that crap!

Google hates plagiarism and asociates it with junk , thats way you lose PR on you sites , thats way you get in the sandbox.
Unique content is the best and you should definitely go for this.
So spun the articles and stop being lazy.

There are many reasons, such as uniquezation of the syndicated content, adding keywords etc.

In fact,i don't like spinning technology.coz it will change the sense of the original article with similar words.It seems the whole spun artcile looks smooth and well stretched.For me, i do post my blog to several top article directories with the same content and same title.I think it alo okay to get quality backlinks for the site.

I think it's best to spin the article sentence by sentence instead of word by word.

Simply put....spinning is a waste of time. Many used to use it when article directories were listed high all over google, but they are no longer getting the same google love.

Syndication works because webmasters and publishers use your content instead of it just sitting on article directories.

Benjamin Ehinger

There is one minor question I have to ask about all this. Why do article directories exist? More specifically, what is the purpose of an article directory?

To say that an article directory is created to provide marketers with another source of backlinks seems a bit...silly.

So, what is the purpose?

I would say an article directory is intended as a source of articles for publishers. A source of articles they can use for syndication.

If that is accepted as the intended purpose of an article directory I fail to see the connection between spinning and article marketing. Even if your brand of article marketing is article directory marketing.

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I hope Bill Platt don't mind me for quoting this passage that made a huge impression on me. It's from his eBook "Turning Words Into Dollars":

Oh, not possible to copy, but in short he argues that the folks behind the spinning software says that people need unique content to avoid the Google Duplicate Content Penalty.

And then the same folks say that you should submit your spun articles to article directories.

Where's the logic in that, he argues?

Spinning to make unique (unique crap, but unique) and then submit to article directories to syndicate the content (where people are NOT allowed to change a word?)

I don't see the logic.

I've only spun articles once in my life. I did it manually, and I felt it was a huge waste of time and energy. I was told to do so in the Rhodes Brothers' Super Affiliate Challenge, so I gave it a try.

I've never done it since, and I see no reason to ever punish myself with such a tedious task again.

This is utter nonsense.

First, you're confusing "duplicate content" with "syndicated content". Looks like you've allowed it to "dupe" you, after all?

Secondly, spinning the content wouldn't improve that situation anyway.

Both those links will help you, should you decide that you'd like to learn something rather than regurgitating mindless misinformation right out of the "urban myth" school of internet marketing.

I have no doubt that G can detect spinning algorithmically. But that's not the sole reason I want to spin (to "fool" Google). It's also so I can camouflage my site network, my content, and the source of my content from competitors. I spin so that they can't quite know where I got the content in some cases. (Obviously, I am reusing content in this case.)

Some of my best traffic generating, syndicated articles are 100% identical to a post that exists on my site originally... Spun shmun.... hehe...

Post on my blog... make sure it's indexed and I'm getting traffic with the original, a week later, use Ezine's plug-in and submit the identical article to them...

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