The Arguments For And Against Article Spinning Software
The Argument For Article Spinning
Article syndication is without doubt one of today’s most effective online marketing tactics. It’s a great way to enhance your reputation as a knowledgeable expert and build top quality back links that drive first page search engine rankings and targeted readers. However, some say that sophisticated duplicate content filters now employed by search engines have complicated the traditional process and that article spinning is now an essential part of article marketing.
The traditional approach to article marketing would be to write one article and syndicate it through multiple article directories and syndication sites. This is where the pro article spinning advocates say the process falls of the rails due to duplicate content issues. The end result would be that only one article would be returned for a relevant search query, probably the one hosted on the most authoritative site or with the greatest amount of inbound links. The rest would be filtered out so that search engine users would be presented with a selection of unique results rather than the same page over and over again. This is absolutely true, search engines filter duplicate content to make it easier for users to locate the information they are seeking and thus heighten user experience.
Article spinning software has improved over time, the original spinners were capable of little more than synonym substitution which produced gibberish. Modern spinners can produce grammatically correct documents and each spun article is capable of passing plagiarism checks of online tools such as Copyscape. Again those advocating article spinning attest this uniqueness is further proof that spun content will fly under the radar of search engine duplicate content filters allowing multiple rankings and greater visibility.
The argument for article spinning sounds entirely convincing, everything is backed up with solid facts based on an accepted understanding of how search engines work. How then are those anti to this marketing tactic going to respond?
The Argument Against Article Spinning
The way search engines read web pages is entirely different to humans. In order to judge each page objectively stop words and punctuation are removed and the remaining words are reduced to their root. Root words are words which other closely related words stem from for example photograph, photographer, photographed, photographic etc. all come from the single common root ‘photograph’. This process, known as document normalization, produces one continuous block of text that is completely incomprehensible to human readers. Below is what this paragraph would look like after the normalization process has been applied.
search engine read web page entir differ human order judg page object stop word punctuat remov remain word reduc root root word word close relat word stem example photograph photograph photograph photograph singl common root photograph process known document normal produc continu block text complet incomprehens human reader below paragraph look like normal process appli
By removing stop words the number of words in an article is reduced by around 40% and with it goes the ability to spin a large part of the document. Furthermore, as you can see from the above example photograph, photographer, photographed and photographic are all reduced to photograph, this further reduces the ability of article spinners to produce truly unique content because a significant amount of substitute words will return to the same root. The document normalization process poses some serious problems for article spinners.
Copyscape is looking for a literal match that includes sentence and paragraph structure as well as punctuation which makes it much easier to fool than Google for example. Much emphasis is being placed on the ability to fool Copyscape and similar online tools, however they have little in common programmatically and serve entirely different purposes.
There are occasions where multiple Google positions will be occupied by spun articles. This does not prove that article spinning works, rather it indicates that the query being searched is non competitive and there is not enough unique pages targeting the term. When this happens Google will permit content that would normally be filtered to populate their main results.
The Article Spinning Challenge
The argument will probably continue unabated unless some definitive proof emerges that proves the value of article spinning one way or the other. To this end two Internet marketers have set themselves a challenge - to see who can achieve the highest number of first page Google rankings for the term ‘Article Spinning’ by the end of May 2010. If you are interested in following the progress of this challenge an up-to-date progress report can be found at the Article Spinning Challenge Hub.
And yes I am one of the challengers, I am attempting to rank for ‘article spinning’ without spinning any articles in the process.
N.B. No articles were spun or harmed in any way in the production of this hub!
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Comments
Thanks for the warnings regarding article spinning. I'm sure there's a great deal of copying and/or plagiarism done on the Internet. Can it ever be stopped entirely?...
Hey Peter, I see you don't seem to like the concept of article spinning at all. I have read some of your other hubs about this and I can understand your dislike, but I am sure it's because of the bad stories you have heard about it or because of the bad results produced from people who just use some of the article spinning tools to spit out thrash, without taking good amount of time and effort to ensure the quality of content is topnotch. You see, article spinnning is "jargon in jargon out". It gives you what you put in. If you put a good amount of time and effort, you will get good results.
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.
There's a lot more to article spinning than just getting an article spinning software with a huge synonyms database (thesaurus) for replacing every word with several others. This will only lead to completely unreadable articles. Anyone that thinks article spinning is all about this has it all wrong. There's much more to article spinning and if done right, it can help you produce hundreds of high quality and readable articles.
One of MOST POWERFUL article spinning tools out there that is completely free is http://www.PlugAndSpin.com
- Author
I am more than happy to be proven wrong, however from the perspective of a professional SEO and marketer, the articles I am required to produce for clients are very targeted towards specific services and products not just a keyword set.
I see no point in handing over a bunch of overly similar documents that don’t scan, that are not completely unique, that fail to grab the reader’s attention from the initial headline and lead them to a highly effective call to action. And I don’t understand why anyone would want to accept anything less.
Furthermore, do you actually understand what normalised text looks like after it has had all the stop words removed and everything that is left reduced to its root? For any article spinner to be effective this is the level it would have to work at.
How does the product you are eager to promote get round this fundamental problem?
- Author
@ Article Spinner, You should write a couple of hubs explaining your point of view. That way you can link back to your website from your own hubs rather than mine.
Yes, Peter, you are right... I should write a couple of hubs not just explaining my point of view but throw a lot more light on how anyone can do article spinning the RIGHT way.
Thanks a lot for mentioning it, :) If there's one thing I do pretty well is write and spin articles the RIGHT way. If done properly using phrases, sentences rewriting and paragraph rewriting, one can spit out hundreds and even thousands of high quality and unique articles.
- Author
I look forward to reading your hubs, perhaps one of them might answer my question about document normalisation.
Contents and Articles are very important. I admit, i am not good in writing article for my blogs and for the content of my sites. Effective Post and content must have something to gain more visitors; to have more traffic.
peter, I have to agree with Article Spinning. When done correctly, spun articles are every bit as compelling as the original. We write original content, but then spin it and submit one spun copy to each article directory. Our content is very readable and I would doubt even a discerning eye could tell it was spun content. We have tried software in the past and even writers from India, but all the software and writers were completely awefull; nothing anyone should ever publish. You have obviously done more research than me on the negative effects on article spinning, but I can't possibly see the harm in spinning when it is done correctly. This provides unique content for each article site and I have never once seen our articles multiple times on a search engine. The readers are not searching for "Foreclosure Help" and finding our articles more than once. The search antilogarithms do a great job of preventing this.
I'm open to the idea of stopping this practice, if it is even slightly harmful, but your arguments have not convinced me yet.
I tried manual article spinner a couple of days ago. I am quite pleased with the results. The articles are quite original since I am the one selecting the words with care. This method works for those sites or directories requiring unique content.
- Author
Good luck with your article spinning scheng1. Actually the last thing article directories want is spun content.
Its obvious from your posts here and on other forum posts that you do not understand how search engines work in particular their use of stop words and semantics.
But like I say good luck with tour spinning. By the way comment links for unregistered users are set to nofollow.
I've never been one for using article spinners, I'd much rather re-write completely an article and add some pictures and other links in there, but then again some articles I don't rewrite unless I can add a new angle on the previous one and scatter them around on the internet.
As for article spinners, they could damage article directories reputations but things are evolving more on the social marketing side and this will only increase the damages of scraper sites and other stuff, I think that articles spinners will only be replaced by something more spammy and damaging.
When I first started out online I tried an article spinner and it took me ages to figure the damn thing out and all the time it takes to go through chopping and changing each sentence, it's just as well going through it yourself and re-writing the article!!
Some still swear by article spinning, but I don't.
Cheers!
I have never done article spinning and after reading this article and the response: I would not submit a spinned article to an article directory, it just seem like the wrong direction. I would probably do to add some content to my blog...every now and then.
- Author
A wise decision indeed.
Article spinning is made with the search engine optimization in mind. But we must remember that search engines are made for people. And what do people want? Helpful content. It doesn't matter if it is spinned or original. What matters is:
1. Does it help and gives value to the reader?
2. How you deliver this content or make it available to the reader?
- Author
Stop Foreclosure, a spun article will not give people what they want only paraphrase something that is already online. How does that help anyone?
There are 2 ways to spin articles:
1. The bad way. You use a crappy spinner and get totally unreadable articles and a low level of uniqueness.
2.The correct way. You use a good article rewriter and use you head to create hi quality articles. It is easy to get articles with 70-80% uniqueness wich are prefectly readable.
So spinning is not a waste of time if you do it right.
Excellent information! Although I spin article to 60 % uniqness I still thing Google bot is way smarter... :-(
Personally I think spinning articles is a waste of time. Provide new, interesting and relevant content and you're targeting new subject areas and keywords etc. If you write more you unique and informative articles you'll attract a larger audience and become an authority in your field.
Great article and very informative on how the process works. I too attempt to spin without spinning. :-)
copyscape will pass gibberish in a heart beat, spinning is the lazy mans way on doing articles
but i can understand why people use it , since were competing with cheap outsourced help
that basically don't have the concept of american culture , even if there educated , so far thats my take on it.
I completely agree btbuzz. I did it for a couple of weeks and was so disheartened. To me, its dishonest and legal plagerism. I tried to do it without spinning and found I made about 10 cents an hour.
How do you feel about sites like Social Monkee, where you have to spin your title and description?
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