Writing can be pretty rough work, and putting together a piece of quality content that’s both properly search-optimized and valuable to the reader can be a very tall order.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could simply take a single good piece of content and turn it into a hundred pieces or more without having to put in any extra effort?
Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of having to pay a hundred writers, you could simply pay one and sell the same piece a hundred times?
Actually, that’s entirely possible – and completely inadvisable.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s talk about content spinning.
The term refers to a black hat SEO technique in which an author uses an application to rewrite their article thoroughly enough that search algorithms will register it as different from the original.
In theory, this allows content resubmission. You can resubmit it hundreds of times. This can be to your own site or other places. If done correctly, you avoid Google’s duplicate content penalty.
Unfortunately, Google’s getting better at detecting spun content every day. Last year’s Panda update effectively crushed content spinning in blogs, and the Deepmind acquisition promises to make the organization’s algorithms considerably more intelligent – and likely even better at working out whether or not a marketer is a lazy sod.
Of course, even getting stuff past Google’s radar doesn’t change the fact that spun content will inevitably be of lower quality than anything produced organically.
See, most content spinning applications replace words and phrases with synonyms. Unfortunately, they don’t grasp the English language well. They tend to produce garbled, nonsensical word salad. It’s rarely workable content.
As an example, spinning the phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” could easily result in something like “the express fawn fox plunged up the dull dog.”
Moderately amusing, sure.
But workable in an online marketing context? Hardly. You might as well just hurl a thesaurus at your keyboard – you’d probably end up with the same results.
Additionally, the quality of spun content is much lower. It won’t resonate with readers. Therefore, it won’t get many social media shares. It also won’t receive many incoming links. Social networks are very important for online marketing now. This might be the technique’s worst flaw.
Okay. So it’s pretty obvious that automated spinning is bad, and you should never do it. But what about spinning an article manually? Is that alright?
Yes and no.
If you’re re-imagining it (or paying a writer to do so) in order for the content to appeal to a different/new audience or from a different perspective, that’s perfectly acceptable.
It’s the same deal if you change a piece’s format. For example, you might republish a blog post as a video. Then again, I would argue these practices aren’t truly “content spinning.” They actually require the marketer to put in some effort.
Writing can be tough work, particularly if you’re trying to optimize a piece so that it shows up in search. It can thus be quite difficult not to succumb to the temptation offered by black hat marketing techniques such as content spinning.
The truth is, though? There’s no easy, one-click, sure-fire way to produce great content. If you think there is, you’re probably just creating more spam to clog up the arteries of the Internet.
