22 August 2012

Social Media

Article Spinning and why it’s a no, from us.

Imagine this; you’re browsing for information on a specific topic that’s highly targeted, so much so that the information on the internet, as far and wide it may be, is limited on that subject and all you keep coming across is pages and pages of gibberish. What’s weird is that as you search you keep coming across a similar written format, content and article size. Coincidence; we think not.

It is in fact a form of ‘Black Hat SEO’ commonly known as Article Spinning.

What is it?

Before Google’s crackdown on poor websites and websites that were designed to generate traffic without actually offering any real information, there were methods and techniques that individuals used to rank higher. One of these was to ‘Spin’ one article into 4, 5 or 6 further articles by changing the text through either by hand or with programs that used algorithms.

These algorithms replaced certain terms or words that were detected in the written content with substitutes, in the end the user was able to replicate one article over and over again making it appear to be different each time. Unfortunately these articles rarely make sense and don’t offer any real benefit to anyone.

I agree the concept of article spinning is sound and in the SEO arena there are requirements and factors such as regular, original content that need to be met, but the problems in spinning go deeper than what they may appear to be.

Implications

Going back to Google’s recent changes and its quest to make the web as user friendly as possible, special attention is given to websites that don’t provide good content. Any form of spinning will reduce the quality of the original article, no matter how good the spinner or spinner software is. It doesn’t matter how many synonyms, verbs, adjectives or nouns you change, Google’s advanced scanning algorithms will spot, scan and record your content as either duplicate, or too similar to other pages.

Conclusion

I guess it’s safe to say that the article spinners understand the concept of regular unique content, but unfortunately with search engines now having the capacity to change the entire language of a website on screen, there isn’t much chance of you getting away from eventually being caught out and consequently bumped from Google’s index.

What’s worse is once an article is seen as a duplicate it will affect your whole site and not just the page it’s written on.

Here’s how you can avoid this all together.

Just write original content, you’ll spend less time writing a short article than you will change a spun article to make it sound right. Original, hand written articles will be shared for years to come, as long as its good content people will want to share it, search for it and Google will index it for much longer because it’s serving a purpose for the users.

It’s really as simple as that.

By Sunny Chana