What is Article Spinning?
Article spinning is a black hat SEO technique wherein a malicious blogger copies and rewrites someone else’s content and republishes it as if it were new. It is also called content spinning.
Article spinning is typically executed with deceitful intent and is intended to trick visitors or search engines into thinking the article is new. Often, a site would spin articles from a competitor’s site and then republish them on theirs.
The attempt to manipulate search engines is why article spinning is considered a black-hat SEO technique. It is also considered plagiarism, especially when the article was spun without the author’s or publisher’s permission.
Malicious bloggers spin articles to prevent Google from identifying the content as duplicates since duplicate content usually has less visibility on search results pages.
Articles can be spun manually or using software. In both cases, it usually involves replacing words with other words. However, the number of words that are changed will vary from site to site. While some may swap out a few words, others may swap sentences or entire paragraphs.
Articles can be spun manually or with the help of software. In either case, the process involves replacing words or phrases with alternatives. For example, replacing house with home or pet with animal. However, both contents will still look alike, so a reader presented with both articles will know they are copies.
Certain bloggers may also employ a less aggressive approach by rewriting entire paragraphs and heavily editing the spun article to no longer resemble the original. This, too, is considered article spinning.
Difference Between Article Spinning and Content Repurposing
Article spinning is different from content repurposing. Content repurposing is the practice of republishing your content in another format. For example, republishing your blog post in video format or republishing parts of your article as social media posts.
On the other hand, article spinning is typically recreated in the same format, with the resulting article being unhelpful and sometimes unintelligible to human readers.
Importance of Article Spinning
Article spinning has no relevance or importance to SEO. It violates Google Search Essential spam policies and could cause Google to issue a manual action penalty against your site. Once that happens, Google will demote your rankings or deindex your site.
Malicious bloggers use article spinning to generate large amounts of content in a short amount of time. Some may share this content across multiple sites as part of a link farm o private blog network and then use it to generate backlinks pointing to their site.
Manual vs. Automated Spinning
Article spinning takes two forms: manual or automated.
Manual article spinning refers to content that is rewritten by hand. In this case, the human writer changes words, phrases, and sentences to make the article appear different from the existing one.
Automated article spinning involves the use of article rewriting software and tools. In the past, these software returned low-quality content but have become more sophisticated with the introduction of artificial intelligence rewriting tools.
However, the use of software generally results in articles that are unintelligible to visitors. Manually spun content is usually better than automated software. However, it is also poor quality since the writer typically rushes through the task.
What to Do Instead of Spinning Articles
If you want to speed up your workflow, you should consider researching and creating your content using artificial intelligence. This is completely safe, as Google allows sites to generate their content using AI.
You should use Content AI for your AI content generation needs. It contains 40+ AI tools that you can use to research, write, and edit your content. You can refer to this page on using Content AI to create content that Ranks on Google.