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Tempted to use an article spinner?

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djbaxter

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Tempted to use an article spinner?
by Laura
August 17, 2012

Driven by a desperate fear of creating duplicate content, many affiliate marketers employ article spinning software to create different versions of a original that they can distribute to various article directories. Is this a good idea? Is it even necessary?

No and no.

There may be some situations where an article spinner is helpful. I haven't happened upon one of those situations yet, but they may exist.

For the most part, they churn out crapola. If you fill your site with crapola, that's the kind of money you're going to earn too. And it's not really needed anyway. You can submit an article verbatim from your site to Ezine or other article directories with no "penalty." This is a widely misunderstood concept.

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Thanks for this post, Minstrel.

You can definitely tell the difference between a genuine article and a spun one. While a robot may not be able to decipher the difference, a human certainly can.

Since you're supposed to be writing for humans, you're well served to write an original article for them. Even if it takes longer it should hold more value than a spun sort, IMHO.
 
I am guilty of using spinning software occasionally, but I always proofread and edit before publishing. I don't see any issues with using article spinners to create different versions of an article as long as they are edited to look and sound as if they were an original written article. I'm sure I'll get some great feedback on this comment! :D
 
I think anyone who still believes that Google can't identify spun content is either in denial or just naive.
 
I don't see any issues with using article spinners to create different versions of an article as long as they are edited to look and sound as if they were an original written article.

Yes, that was the point of the article - I wouldn't make the blanket statement that they're all bad all the time, but they certainly don't work well without human intervention. :)
 
Article spinners are part of the reason for the Panda algorithm. Wiping out low quality junk caused article marketing (previously abused) to become a losing proposition.

Whatever the reasons for using article spinners, there aren't many good ones. It's risky.

The down and dirty, fast ways of doing this are becoming increasingly rare.
 
If you use a spinner, take some time and look through your article since there can be some mistakes and comlpete nonsense.
 
For anyone who thinks Google can't identify spun content, do a search for "Google Stop Word List", remove these known stop words and then see what you have left of an article, then consider LSI (Latent semantic indexing) which is a fancy phrase for character string analysis, and you will see that they can and do pick up on spun content.

Penguin took out loads of blog networks, and it was not footprints that most would think, it was the same content...just spun, just like they did with article directories.

This was not the only thing they calculated in their probabilities or "features" of machine learning, but it played a major part of it.

Spin content? Check! Penguin...Checkmate!
 
If be careful with this one. I've used a spinner and the content was awful and actually detrimental. I had to rewrite most of it and spent a lot longer on it than I should have done
 
Wow, no penalty from Google for having duplicate content??

I mean, isn't that what it is in effect if we post something from our sites verbatim on eZine, etc.???

Also, I have to somewhat disagree with article spinning...now I've never believed in them myself, but until Penguin they did seem to work for someone I know who runs his own three-man SEO business...and even now it still works for him, only nowhere near as easily as before...and as for article marketing submissions to article directory networks, he still swears by UAW....
 
It will still work to a certain extent now, but your friends would get a lot better results just by syndicating without it being spun. Press releases still work great and are not spun, article directories still work to some degree. But the main part that causes trouble is getting links from sites hit by panda, and people who will accept spun and unreadable content generally have no clue about panda, therefore making the links from them worthless on scale.

On a scale of 1 to 10, if you get a link from a blog that allows or accepts spun content, the value will be a fraction of 1, where with a press release will give you a value of 2. These numbers are just an example and are not real numbers to factor your rankings by, but lets say I get one link from Gizmodo and it is an original writing, it may be a 7,8 or even a 9 on our make believe scale. trash in...trash out...

SEO is now about quality, not quantity.
 
This forum is a pain now, can't edit, but anyway I wanted to show you how and why spinning is bad. Matt Cutts states in the following video that you should use synonyms and that they have a team dedicated to this factor, but at around 1:40 in he states that if you do Google would not have to "Guess" or "Estimate" what the page is about.

This means they know and since they now use machine learning, they are using probabilities from the massive amount of data they have to calculate this. This means there is a line with their probabilities when it will be absolute that you are spinning and penguin hits. First they discount, then they punish.

[video=youtube;NpnnXt7CHMU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpnnXt7CHMU&feature=g-high[/video]
 
I understand, was just trying to put the content together, set it up and then had to redo it. Was just frustrated.
 
So a 100% exact copy posted on eZine is considered "syndication" but spun content elsewhere would trigger an automatic penalty?? Is that the gist of things today?

Glad about the renewed emphasis on "quality," though...I sometimes wonder whether it's "quality" (of writing, given machine learning's ability to calculate originality and complexity) that's kept my site (an inner page only, though) on page one for my primary keyword now that my article directory links have probably been vaporized by Penguin....
 
So a 100% exact copy posted on eZine is considered "syndication" but spun content elsewhere would trigger an automatic penalty?? Is that the gist of things today?

For the most part yes, but like I stated, they are working on probabilities and Google has a very lenient cushion to keep from hitting sites that may have similar content. From the data and testing with my team it looks like the penguin is more about paid links (high pr homepage links), non related links in content (example:a link to a dolphin site or page within content about affiliate marketing) and just terrible and automated spinning that is complete gibberish. That's where you get link notifications from, the most effective part of the penguin algorithm is devaluing the rest of spun content and causing rankings drops. I have put 6 sites in penguin and taken all of them out of it by adding more quality links. There was also a major change in anchor text ratios with penguin.

The only thing i am not sure about still is if the penguin algo notifies and sparks a manual review if a trigger is tripped at some point because Google has already admitted that unnatural link notifications are done manually. I just do not know if the algo catches a potential violation and sends an email or some other notification to a manual reviewer or if they are just sending them as they catch them surfing.

And yes, syndication is A-OK. News companies still do it as press release companies do.
 
I always believe that spinning is a terrible method for SEO. If you write your own interesting articles then you can attract people to your site through that interest. Its not all about placing keywords in repetetive text
 
I remember a time when I was asked to use an article spinner to rewrite articles. However, I think it also still takes time since I would have to read and edit some parts of the article so I would be sure that the articles would still make sense.
 
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