Article spinning, also known as content spinning, is where a piece of content, like a blog post, is rewritten hundreds of times, often with the help of ‘spinning software’. It is considered a black hat SEO technique as it usually produces poor quality and unhelpful content for the end user.
How does Article Spinning Work?
Article spinning begins with someone writing content. This could be a blog post or an informational article, as an example.
They would then feed the content into ‘spinning software’ which rewrites the original in hundreds, sometimes thousands of different ways.
These rewritten articles would then be submitted on sites across the web creating a huge net of backlinks to the original.
This tricks Google into thinking that the original content is incredibly popular and trustworthy and rewards it with high rankings in SERPs.
But just how does the spinning software do it?
‘The freshly baked cookies would be great with a glass of milk.’
Now just think of how many words in the above sentence could be replaced with synonyms.
The freshly baked cookies would be delicious with a glass of milk.
The freshly baked cookies would be great with a cup of milk.
The freshly baked cookies should be great with a glass of milk.
And this is just off the top of my head. So if we were using software that uses complex algorithms to discover all the possibilities then we’d be looking at tonnes of options.
Why is Article Spinning Used?
Usually, content spinning is used as a shortcut to avoid spending hours upon hours of time writing fresh content.
Most writers may naturally do a version of content spinning to avoid plagiarism. When researching a topic we don’t want to just outright copy the content we learnt from however, our knowledge may not be great enough to be able to write about a topic independently.
In this instance, like a teenager in school, we may use the source content - ie, a Wikipedia page - and reword the paragraphs so as to not get found out by teachers that we pretty much copied it all.
There is one difference here. Hopefully, our researching teenager would have still used their common sense to ensure that the sentences made sense. Both to themselves and their teacher. Their content still had human input.
And whilst spinning software is now becoming incredibly clever in being able to mimic human writing, after a while it will become plain that this automated content is entirely soulless.
For this reason, article spinning isn’t considered good practise either and will be flagged up as a black hat SEO technique by Google.
Why is Spinning Articles Considered Black Hat SEO?
Ultimately, when creating content, you should be thinking of the UX (User Experience) that you’ll be creating. And if it is poor, due to shady corner cutting, then it’s considered black hat.
When using a tool or software it’s easy for content to become incoherent babble. Useful for no one and yet cluttering up the SERPs for a search term.
We’d now be in a position where we’d need to wade through potentially thousands of results that are the same content reworded before we reach anything helpful.
The frequently updated Google algorithm is seeking to take down any sites that contain any sort of automated content so we are only presented with fresh and high quality content on our results pages.
What to do Instead of Spinning Content?
The first step to staying well away from any sort of content spinning is to keep your audience in mind. Your content needs to be useful for the reader rather than bots.
You’ll run the risk of increasing your bounce rate, reducing your dwell time and ultimately lose out on conversions if you provide a horrendous UX.
You can create high quality content quickly by hiring some great writers, you don’t need to do all this work yourself.
That said, when it comes to implementing white hat SEO techniques, most marketers know that it will take time before you start to see results.
But you know what they say, anything worth having is hard work!
Tools to Help you Create Content
Here are some tools to help you research, write and create content.
SEMrush writing assistant is a useful tool to cater to all your content writing needs. It gives your reading a score based on 4 parameters: readability, originality, tone of voice, and SEO.
The basic aim of the content you create is to answer the questions your visitors ask and attain high visibility in search engines. This writing assistant helps you achieve this aim with ease.
All you have to do is enter your target keywords, and it’ll come up with a bunch of SEO recommendations.
The tool also offers word count recommendations and gives your piece an originality score.
CoSchedule is a work management software for marketers. It has a headline analyzer - the Headline Studio - that offers headline feedback based on thousands of data points.
Its free browser extension helps you optimize your headlines in just 30 seconds.
A well-written headline is one of the ways to drive more traffic. This tool ensures that your headlines work great to generate more visitors and sales.
CoSchedule also has a marketing suite that helps you automate your teamwork flows and track team progress.
One of the most important aspects of content creation is to draw the attention of your readers through visually appealing images. Canva helps with that.
It is designed to create professional images for your website and social media - instantly.
Anyone can produce visual content using this designing tool.
With its 420,000+ custom templates and 75+ million premium stock photos, videos, audio and graphics, this tool is a highly-recommended time-saving option you can choose.
5. GrowthBar
GrowthBar is a tool loved by thousands of content creators.
It helps you generate outlines for your articles, provides keywords for better ranking, offers word count suggestions, and takes care of the images, headlines, and references for your blog posts.
It provides suggestions for the best SEO practices and helps you outrank your competitors.
This tool also generates data related to your competitor’s traffic, their google and Facebook Ads, backlinks, and their organic keywords.
All of these features help you curate content that Google loves.
How Can We Help?
Want to improve your rankings and get your content noticed?
Contact us to talk about the paths you should be exploring to unlock your business’ potential and potentially be paired with a great team to get to work!
Not quite ready to spend money on your strategy? Why don’t you head over to our blog in the meantime to find all sorts of useful tips and tricks you could be implementing right now to improve your SEO.
