Why Article Spinning Is A Complete Waste Of Time
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Why Article Spinning Is A Complete Waste Of Time.
Article spinners are tools that take one article and create, or spin, hundreds of unique articles based on the original. Rather, that’s what the creators of these systems would have us believe.
Why Spin Articles?
First of all let’s examine why you might want to create multiple versions of an original article. If you syndicate articles your goal might be to submit unique articles to each article site in order to escape Google’s duplicate content filter. Or, if you are unscrupulous, it could be to steal the hard work of others and change it in order to pass it off as your own. In truth, article spinners are incapable of doing either.
Before getting into the technical reasons why this can’t be done, consider the effect that spun articles could have on the reader and their perception of your company. Imagine the frustration of finding multiple search results that are essentially the same, the tiles might differ slightly and a few words in each paragraph might be altered. Not only will the searcher, who is presumably a prospective customer, increasingly feel you are wasting their time with each discovery of another spun document, they will quickly become aware that you are deliberately spamming them.
Articles that are syndicated without change retain the same title and often the same description. This lets the searcher skip a duplicate result rather than being force fed the same material over and over. Search engines calculate the uniqueness of a document programmatically, humans don’t, by simply changing a few words here and there you will not dupe the human reader.
Checking Syndication Progress
Changing page titles can make it difficult to track article syndication. To check syndication progress you can use Google’s intitle: advanced operators:
intitle:”Another Look At SEO”
The above article was syndicated through http://www.isnare.com alone. By using multiple syndication sites to promote your articles you can increase the number of indexed pages (and therefore links to your site).
Host Crowding
As you can see there is little evidence of this article being punished by any duplicate content filter. That’s because the article is still seen as unique although there are multiple instances of the same document. Host crowding is a filter that limits the amount of pages that can be returned for a single domain for any given search. Although I maintain a website about SEO and many pages talk about different aspects of SEO the maximum pages that will be included within the search results is restricted to the 2 most relevant results. Sometimes these results will be shown together with the second result slightly indented or sometimes the second result can be on a page deeper in the results.
Host crowding prevents search engines from listing multiple, overly similar, results from a single site and makes locating information easier for the user. Host crowding filters will not exclude articles from other domains unless there is already two documents hosted on that domain that are deemed more relevant to the users search.
Article spinning cannot address this problem and in-fact may make things worse. Article spinning is a weak attempt to game search engine algorithms and as such should be used with care if used at all. Ok, it’s open to debate whether article syndication is in itself an attempt to game search engine algorithms. Isn’t the goal of posting the same article to multiple sites to gain back-links, PageRank and consequently rankings rather than attract links naturally to your website? Even if you consider article syndication 'grey', by spinning those articles you start to game prospective customers, which, in my opinion, an entirely different proposition.
SEO Scotland: Promoting business online with professionalism and integrity.
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Comments
@ Automated. It’s my opinion that you would be wasting your time but I an sure the snake oil salesmen who pedal that nonsense will contradict me soon enough!
Very interesting hub Peter! I have so many varied thoughts on this highly controversial subject that I really don't know where to start. What I will agree with is that most article spinning attempts are a piece of crap. By changing a few words here & there it does nothing. And oftentimes the spunt content sounds very mechanical and non-human. I do see a Major problem with this case.
Now if an author wants to create derivative works of their original content i.e. Rewrite it, then I really don't see a problem with that as long as the content is in fact changed significantly. Also with so many article directories and content sites urging that they don't want any material that you have published somewhere else -- creating different versions of an article may be practically necessary if you want to your material to be included.
So I guess in nutshell what I'm trying to say is... Yes, I totally agree with the "traditional way" that I've seen article spinning done. However, a writer who takes the time not only to alter a few words here & there in their writings - but to really REWRITE different versions of their article just may benefit.
Just like in person-to-person conversion, oftentimes different people comprehend things in different ways. You explain something to one person in one way and then you might have to say the same thing with a whole new set of words to drive your point home to the next person. This is essentially what i mean by Rewriting an article. It's all about Communication. We rewrite our statements all the time in real life conversation by basally saying the same thing but using different word choices to communicate with different people in our lives. Therefore, I see no reason why those same natural human communication skills can't be used on the web effectively as well (as long as it's done tactfully, creatively and ethically!).
I know I rambled on here but I had (and still have) so many varied opinions and angles to discuss this topic. Thanks again Peter for a thought-provoking hub!!!
Yes, it’s impossible to write one article that addresses the needs of readers that could be Visual, Auditory or Kinaesthetic. However, over time you might be able to asses if there is a prominent modality amongst your target readers, there might be, and there might not be. Again, I would say this is beyond the scope of article spinning and may indeed involve writing multiple articles to communicate clearly with people of different modalities.
We "sorta" spin articles with 4 writers. Basically we give them the same keywords and have each write copy of about 500 words. Obviousely it should be on the same topic not just keywords. Basically we use humans rather than software. Amazing at how creative the human mind can be. :) thanks for sharing Peter.
Gabriella
Thanks for this hub, Peter. Very informative and great to see more integrity out there. I'm new at affiliate/internet marketing so can you tell me..... Do you think it HURTS the seller to post the same exact article in more than one location?
Anne
Your search - Intitle:”Another Look At SEO” - did not match any documents.
Something gone wrong, is it? Not sure what happened, looks like intitle stopped working for me :(
Figured it out - it did not like the capital letter for some reason :D
Oh, and you did not convince me, at least not yet. I might buy into this if you setup the serious comparative test, though :)
Hi Misha, thanks for pointing out the typo I have corrected it.
I will be happy to set up a comparative test although I think the results from the initle: search pretty much discounts the existence (or perhaps the effectiveness) of a cross domain dupe content filter. And, after all, isn’t the existence of this filter is the reason for using article spinners?
I agree Peter, having seen some article spinners, 99.9% are worthless
I think Gabriella has the best solution for duplicating articles on a given topic.
I've just set up an article directory at www.onbo.com , I've gotten tired of all the advertising they put inside the content of our articles. Feel free to submit some
Anne4153,
My reasoning above is restricted to article syndication and in that respect I have experiences no problems syindicating the same article across multiple domains.
Hi Stephen, there seems to be a problem with the link to www.onbo.com in your profile.
I enjoyed your views about making money online, I can see it isn't a peice of cake, it does take a lot of time and researching to learn about it, I sure did spen toms of time looking for that short cut to wealth, not happening her eyet, I have beed at it sense Sept. 2008 studying every night after work, and I learned a lot but still no fast track to wealth yet. the articles left by your visitors were interesting also. thanks and have a nice day pete.
Edward J Clements
Peter, I agree with you completely that MOST article spinning is a complete waste of time, but not ALL. Article spinning can indeed be VERY POWERFUL, if done right. I once heard someone saying article spinning is for the lazy folks. Well, as strange as it might sound, article spinning is actually for those that are NOT lazy. But of course, I am talking about the RIGHT way of spinning your articles. There's the wrong way and the right way. The wrong way is when you just automatically use the synonym replacement aspect of article spinning software to spit out completely unreadable gibberish, in the name of articles. That's just junk and no one can read even one sentence from such junk articles. But if you really want to get the best from article spinning, then a great deal of effort is required to put into the original work. By a lot of effort I am talking about investing several hours or even days to get one SEED article or a group of SEED articles rewritten with different phrases, sentences and paragraphs. If done right, just one SEED article can be uniquely spun into hundreds or even thousands of copies that can escape the duplicate content filter!One of MOST POWERFUL article spinning tools out there that is completely free is http://www.PlugAndSpin.com
Those are great links Article Spinner. What a really useful and information packed page you have brought to our attention. Did you spend as much time on your article spinner as you did on this page?
It seems HubPages is not immune to the crap article spinners churn out
This comment was originally posted by Article Spinner. The original post has been deleted so that the links can be removed.
Ha ha ha, Peter... your comments show that you truly really hate article spinning and article spinners. But the truth is that they are NOT the enemy. The enemy are those that use the article spinning tools and system the wrong or evil way.
Like I alway say...
Article spinning is evil if you are evil. It is NOT evil if you are NOT evil. This reminds me of a statement I heard sometime ago that goes - There's no evil in the Atom. Only in men's hearts. Those people who made the atomic bomb for the purpose of destroying people are the evil people, not necessary the atom itself. Same applies with article spinning. There's no evil in article spinning... only in men's hearts! So, don't believe those people who go around saying that article spinning is EVIL. It's not.
@ Article Spinner I have also removed the duplicate post made on another hub.
Hey Peter, I took a look at the hub you pointed out - http://hubpages.com/hub/All-about-Toyota-Hybrid-Ca . Yep, it's folks like that who give article spinning a bad name. With folks like that and with content like that you are RIGHT to say article spinning is a complete waste of time because NO ONE will read such junk.
I have said it several times, but it's worth repeating...
It's not enough to just replace one word with dozens of other synonyms. Article spinning is much more than that. Because of the complexity of the English language, just replacing words with synonyms won't do the trick and will only end up giving anyone completely unreadable articles. Instead of thinking synonyms when it comes to article spinning, serious article spinners should think of phrases rewrites, sentences rewrites and paragraph rewrites. When combined, these will give you far more excellent output than just replacing one word with several synonyms.
Thanks! for the heads up about the link.
I've updated it
to manny times people dismiss something because they simply haven't gone down the rabbit hole deep enough to make something work effectively. When i came accross article spinning it took me quitte a bit of time to actually find satisfactory answers to the challenges involved with article spinning (i.e. creating unique content variations). Even though I haven't have enough time with submitted spinned articles, so far it is absolutely not been a wast of time. I yet have to come accross any solution, traffic generation or otherwise, which does not involve hours of making it your own.
David, you assume I haven’t tested article spinners which I have. But if it works for you then thats great. I am in the position where each article I post has to be approved by the client. I cannot do this with spun content regardless how much time I spend tweaking. I see better results through quality not quantity.
Often search engines will see the spun article as an exact duplicate as the original anyway. During the normalisation of a web page a search engine removes all the punctuation and stop-words (probably about 50% of the words on a page) and then reduces the remaining words to their root.
For me, this has been an extremely informative and interesting hub...I know it was written a while back, but I am positive that all the information still holds true...even with the ever changing inet....Thanks for writing this!!!
I have a question...
What if a person is Spanish or Portuguese and have articles and translate the articles to English. Do you find it also dishonest even the content isn't duplicated?
Translations may also vary from person to person, and texts can never be equal...
Give me your thoughts about this ok?
Thanks
Automated Ebook says:
12 months ago
Interesting as I have been considering Jet Submitter. Hmmm..