Article Spinners: Why? How? And A Free Content Spinner

Although not widely known, content spinners have actually been around for a few years now. Article, or content spinning is using an original article as the basis to generate an unlimited number of new unique versions of the text. There are several content spinners available, and many considered them an essential tool for article marketing.

The new articles present the same concepts and ideas as the original, but written in different ways. They all are grammatically correct and perfectly readable, but each is unique, differing from the others in terms of the sentences and words used.

Why would you want to do that?

Simple: To avoid the duplicate content penalty at search engines like Google.

Let's say you've written an article. You've done your article directory submissions and the article has also been picked up by a few webmasters and used on their sites. When Google comes along and analyzes those pages, it can tell that they all contain the same content.

You might have heard that you don't have to worry about duplicate content because each page has other content on it in addition to the article.

Unfortunately, that's not the case.

You see, when it analyzes pages, Google doesn't simply compare the full text of the pages against each other, but many short excerpts from them. It then works out how many text snippets from the different pages are the same. A duplicate content flag is raised when the percentage of matches goes above a predetermined threshold.

In anycase, site navigation and other standard elements often account for much of the page content besides the article itself. Where it's the same on each page of a site, Google is usually able to differentiate it from the actual content and so discount in its comparison.

In the past you could simply replace words in your article with synonyms to avoid the duplicate content filter. That doesn't work anymore. Not unless it's done to the point that your article no longer makes sense to a human reader. And even then Google still might spot it. Gathering dust on my hard disk is a Windows application I bought which does that.

Having ascertained the pages it's looking at contain duplicate content, Google chooses the one it thinks is most relevant to the keyword phrase the searcher entered. It then filters out the other pages, usually leaving only the preferred article page visible in the results.

This means that if you have syndicated an article on your site, whenever the page of one of the other websites using it is considered more relevant to the keyword being searched than yours, your page simply won't appear in the results. It's your article, but someone else is getting the benefit ... not with you, but at your expense.

The duplicate content penalty isn't just a theory or something I'm making up. Google state that:

"During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in "regular" and "printer" versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one version to list."

In short, where there are duplicates, Google picks one of them to display in the search results.

"In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved."

In addition, Google might take things further and make an adjustment to the rankings of entire sites it considers to be cheating. But just what is considered an "intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive" by Google?

Well, if your reasons for submitting to article directories include getting more backlinks in order to rank higher, you can safely assume you know at least one activity that is. A lot of the value of submitting is lost if those backlinks are discounted.

"However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments ... so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that'll befall webmasters is to see the "less desired" version of a page shown in our index."

Google tactfully omit to mention here that the "less desired" page may be on another site!

Here's some more about the most relevant parts of Google's duplicate content policy with a link to the rest on the Google blog.

Popular article directories and major websites have many inbound links, a high PageRank and strong web presence overall. So unless your own site is well established, when you submit an article, its page on one of these sites is more likely to come up in the search results than the copy of the article your website.

With an article spinner and a little effort, you can take a base article and quickly transform it to create many new and unique versions. Then you can use one version on your own website and another for submitting to article directories, or for publication by other webmasters.

In fact, you can even submit a different version of your article to each directory. Whilst perhaps only worthwhile doing for the top directories, this will certainly increase how often your article comes up in the search results, because for every article directory with the identical article, Google will choose only one to display in the search results.

Spun articles are so good that you could theoretically make an entire website from one article, using a different version on each page. To a search engine (and in fact), each page is unique because the structure, sentences and words between them vary so much.

The article spinning concept is simple. Let's look at exactly how it works. Below are 3 sentences:

1. Affiliate marketing is an easy income source once you understand how it's done.

2. When you've mastered the basics, it's not difficult to make good money as an affiliate.

3. Once you've learnt the basic techniques, affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative.

The three sentences carry the same general meaning, yet all are completely different.

We can expand on this by further breaking down each sentence. Instead of "Affiliate marketing is an easy income source" in sentence 1, I could say:

"You can make plenty of money in affiliate marketing" or

"Working as an affiliate marketer is an easy path to a solid income" or

"Affiliate marketing can be highly profitable"

Again, in each phrase the meaning conveyed is much the same. All of them will also fit nicely with the second part of the sentence, "once you understand how it's done."

When using a content spinner, you go through your article in a similar fashion, writing new sections with alternative wording. These can be short or long; sentences, phrases, entire paragraphs or just words. This provides the article spinner software lots of different bits from which it makes random selections to bind together as a new article.

The spinner will always process content in the same order as it's written, so despite the spun articles being made up of many bits of text randomly joined together, they are always readable and make sense.

No matter how many bits of alternative text you provide in your article, the content spinner can run through them all so fast that it can create hundreds of unique combinations in seconds. With each combination you have a brand new, original article.

Using An Article Spinner

In most article spinners the pipe "|" character is used to tell the software that the next bit of text is a variation of the last. You may know from Regex, programming or Boolean search commands that the pipe represents "OR". It's function in article spinners is the same.

In order for the article spinner to recognize the start and end point of the text on either side of a pipe or set of pipes, the sections must be marked off on each side, usually by wrapping them in curly braces "{" & "}" .

Here's how you'd write your article for your content spinner, using our example above again:

{Affiliate marketing is an easy income source once you understand how it's done|When you've mastered the basics, it's not difficult to make good money as an affiliate|Once you've learnt the basic techniques, affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative}.

Now we'll put in the additional phrases we wrote for sentence 1 by nesting the braces within each other:

{{Affiliate marketing is an easy income source|You can make plenty of money in affiliate marketing|Working as an affiliate marketer is an easy path to a solid income|Affiliate marketing can be highly profitable} once you understand how it's done|When you've mastered the basics, it's not difficult to make good money as an affiliate|Once you've learnt the basic techniques, affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative}.

If it looks complicated, read it again. It's really not.

To be frank though, adding the pipes and braces as you write is much easier than attempting to work back and figure out something that's already been written. Doing it yourself, you already have the alternatives in your head and are simply recording them.

I had to buy an article spinner out of my own pocket, but now there's a free content spinner called Jetspinner you can use instead.

Although free (for how long I can't say) it's not a limited or demo version. Jetspinner is as good as any of the article spinners on the market. The article spinner I bought still sells for over $90, in many respects it's identical, but it doesn't have Jetspinner's data merge function!

And if you want, Jetspinner's output can be sent directly to the Jetsubmitter article submitter. Doing so enables you to send out a unique version of your article to each of 400+ article directories. A handy trick.

Because it's still new, relatively few people of heard of Jetspinner. But as there are no other free article spinners like it, in time it's sure to become extremely popular.

I suggest you start using it right away. The reason being that right now you will face much less competition from other article marketeers spinning their articles, than you are likely to face in 6-12 months time.

That means it will be much easier for you to brand yourself or your site as a topic expert than it will for others who come later.

You will also have generated hundreds of highly targeted links to your pages in the gradual way search engines like, which no competitor can suddenly catch up with without being punished by the search engines for an unnaturally quick growth in links.

There's a bonus for new users during the launch period as well. You can find out the details at Jetspinner.

Alternatively, you can take a look at some of the article content spinners currently on sale: Artemis Pro, Article Post Robot, Article Uniqualizer and Content Rewriter Pro.

If you're lazy, or simply don't have the time to use an article spinner (I understand it's not for everyone), or write lots of unique articles, then you really only have 2 options if you want to succeed with article marketing:

1. Pay people to write articles for you ($10 - $20 each)
2. Use a content service like the ones below

Article Underground offers a route that requires far less effort, but predictably, costs considerably more.

400 exclusive content articles are provided each month to a maximum of 350 people. These are not the usual PLR fare, but are written by professionals and SEO optimized for specific keyword phrases, which are selected based on profitability (high traffic keywords, with high click bids, and low competition).

By linking to them from the Article Underground's network of high PR blogs, your article pages are guaranteed traffic. This aspect isn't talked about much, but to meit's more than half the job. Links like that are gold, and mean you don't have to waste time finding directories, or exchanging / buying links. An ingenious idea.

Even if you don't think Article Underground is for you, I'd head over there anyway just to download the free PDF reports, Words = Money (How to Use Articles to Build Profitable Adsense Web Sites) and "Ban Proofing Your Web Sites (to make long term money with article marketing) which include over 3 hours of free video.

Another option is the brand new iContentRobot content generator, from Google Snatch author Latif. Branded as a solution that creates unique articles for you in just 3 seconds (at the push of a button), this is perhaps the perfect solution for lazy article marketers simply looking for content. The system allows you to create an unlimited number of articles for each of 50 different keywords each month in different niche markets.

According to Latif, his people create the content. It's not created from PLR content, content snippets extracted from around the web, or anything like that. It's actually real content -- grammatically correct, LSI, keyword targeted, proof read content.