Article spinning involves taking an article, or other content that has been written, and then making a series of changes to that article to make it seem original. This is most commonly done to fool search engines into believing that what they are indexing is new, and not just a repost of the same thing from somewhere else. Article spinning is also sometimes used to get an article past human moderators of duplicate content as well, who can often only perform basic checks to see if the article is original content or not. However, this is often much less effective because the more an article is “spun” the more it begins to look artificial.

To understand anyone uses article spinning, some background information is helpful.

There are numerous ways to earn money online. However, all of them eventually come back to the same basic requirement, traffic. Although there doesn’t necessarily have to be a lot of traffic, depending upon the money-making technique being used, and how much it pays, there still must be a minimum stream of visitors in order to make a profit.

While there are several ways to drive traffic, the most common, and the most predictable (as well as free) method is through ranking high in search engines, particularly Google’s search results. Some claim that a #1 ranking for a profitable term in Google’s search engine results can be worth thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars per month in revenue. Whether this comes from actual sales, advertising, or other methods, it all starts with a high ranking for a particular search.

Google’s basic search results ranking algorithm comes from the theory that the more other websites that point to a certain website, the more respected that website is, and thus the higher it should be ranked. There are a million variables between the beginning of that statement and the end of it, but, with all other things being held equal, the essential premise remains true: more links equals higher search engine ranking.

The obvious way to take advantage of this system would be to just put up a million links to your webpage and enjoy your Number One ranking. Fortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Google employs numerous filters, and other computerized evaluations to help determine if the links are legitimate or not, and what value, if any should be assigned to each one. One of these filters involves downgrading links that come from content that is published elsewhere. The idea being that if it is the same article, then the links it gives are actually the same endorsements as before, and not new ones, and therefore should not count at the same level as the others. This is commonly called the Duplicate Content Penalty.

To avoid the duplicated content penalty without having to actually take the time and effort to manually re-write an article, computerized programs can be used to substitute phrases, words, and even paragraphs into and out of the articles.

Spinning Example:

Original Sentence: The rise of Monkey Ninja flu in the general population has caused an alarming increase in the number of patients admitted to local hospitals.

A sentence like this can be spun in numerous ways. For example, the word “number” could be replaced with the word “amount” without changing the meaning, structure, or grammatical validity of the sentence.

Of course, to be worthwhile there needs to be more permutations in order to generate hundreds or even thousands of articles. Article spinners, therefore employ synonym lists, to automatically generate new versions of the sentence. This level of automation doesn’t always work out so well. Consider, for example, The ascent of Monkey Ninja flu in the basic population has made an alarming addition in the amount of sick people allowed to nearby hospitals.

This is still a real sentence, but it won’t make it by any legitimate editor who is paying attention.

Advanced article spinners attempt to correct for this problem by allowing the user to set the replacements and then generating all of the possible combinations. There is a bit of skill in creating “more spinnable” content in the first place and then in creatively coming up with ways to make valid replacements.

So far, this seems to be a valuable technique for those looking to easily manipulate search engine rankings. However, it seems to take an inordinate amount of these links to accomplish the same thing that a relatively smaller number of “real” links can, suggesting that Google is possibly getting better at catching spinning, or that its algorithm in general is becoming less impressed with the raw volume of links a website has.