Is Article Spinning An Effective Article Marketing Technique?
Article Spinning promises to increase search engine rankings, back links and traffic by recycling
existing articles. No more auto generated junk, claims one software developer, alas there is still no
fix as yet for the auto generated blandness. Sure, article spinning has evolved over the last couple
of years but even so spun content could still damage your credibility. Unless you proof read every
spun article you could inadvertently be sending out the wrong message to your target readers.
However, it might all be academic anyway if your article spinning efforts are being foiled by
Google’s sophisticated duplicate content filters.
Can Spun Content Beat Duplicate Content Filters
Visit almost any site promoting article spinning software and you will be treated to the obligatory
before and after text snippets, and very impressive they are. But search engines don’t read the
same way as us humans, nor do they consider every word contained in an article. In order to
evaluate each document objectively stop words and punctuation are removed and words
converted to their root. What is left is a single block of text that is virtually incomprehensible to
the human reader. The block of text below is how a search engine would see the opening
paragraph of this article.
article spin promis increase search engine rank back link traffic recycle exist article more auto
gener junk claim softwar develop fix auto gener bland sure article spin evolve over last coupl year
even spun content damage credibl unless proof read everi spun article inadvert send wrong messag
target reader academ article spin effort foil google sophist duplic content filter
In order to establish context and relevancy search engines analyze text at a much lower level than
that of the intended reader. This creates a massive problem for article spinners. Firstly by
removing stop words it reduced the size of the article, as far as search engines are concerned, by
about 40%. Spun or un-spun content this figure is pretty much constant. Then there is stemming
to contend with, for example the words photo, photograph, photographed, photography,
photographic, photogenic and any plural versions are all stemmed from the same root. This means
that any substitution of words sharing the same root will have absolutely no effect; they will
ultimately be seen as one and the same.
In search engine parlance the above process is known as normalization and it dramatically reduces
the amount of words that article spinners can effectively control and substitute. Also the the
choice of words that can be substituted have to be chosen carefully. This is a serious blow to the
effectiveness of article spinning, and perhaps explains why spun articles don’t rank for competitive
terms.