Marketing Matrix: The Shady Practice Of Spinning Articles To Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties

by Miriam Ellis

If you've been walking on the sunny side of a clean street on your Search Marketing journey, hopefully you've skipped right past that dark and narrow alleyway in which lurks the spin monster. The practice of 'spinning' articles for directory submission isn't new, but it has come to my notice that marketing firms are currently utilizing this as a post-Panda effort for avoiding the dread Google duplicate content label, and I'm writing this article today to describe what the process is. If you're about to hire a marketer/SEO whose methods of promotion include submitting 'spun' articles to content sites, read this first before you sign that contract.

How To Spin An Article

In a rancid little nutshell, spinning articles involves creating synonyms or alternates for words and phrases within the body of the copy so that the text can be hashed up and put together again as though it were multiple pieces of content instead of just one. Here is an example of what this looks like:

{Some marketers | Some SEOs | Some consultants} {persist in | insist on} believing that it is better to {attempt to | try to} {hoodwink | fool | trick} Google than to devote {time | effort | money} towards playing by the rules for their clients' long-term success.

From the above example, you can see how choosing the alternate wordings would enable one to create copy with a certain percentage of distinctness. The whole point, as far as I understand it, is that you can then submit the spun articles to multiple sources for the sole sake of backlinks. The education, engagement and reading pleasure of human beings is definitely not the object.

You can hire a 'copywriter' to manually spin articles for you, or you can shove the task off onto a helpless computer program which is, of course, incapable of protest. Either way, you are engaging in a practice which I can only view as one of those ugly outcomes of Google's historic dependence on links as a metric for relevance and authority.

Why I Think Article Spinning Is Shady

As a professional copywriter, my instinctive response to what this practice does with the English language is one of revulsion. Language can be so powerful, and to see it reduced to this purpose is like watching someone whittle a Redwood into a toothpick. In my opinion, this type of marketing hinges on the lowest form of communication of feeding the stupidest of the bots. Why settle for this when your alternatives have the potential to inspire, enlighten and satisfy those real human beings - your customers?

My tender personal feelings about fine prose aside, every business owner must realistically confront the fact that everything published by him and about him on the web is a piece of his reputation. Do you really think that having your linked signature on an article at garbage-content.com is going to show you in a professional light? Consider that.

Thirdly, I find article spinning to be a poor concept from its very foundations because it is built on deception. The intent is to deceive Internet users, search engine bots and, possibly, content sites. If your marketer thinks that the best way to get ahead is with a good old lie - well, you've got a problem on your hands.

Finally, the fact that dubious marketing firms are apparently seeing this as the answer to Panda means that some people have come out of that web-wide shakeup without having learned a lesson. Instead of trying to become more genuine in their business practices, some business owners/SEOs are simply trying to find other ways to game the system. Of course, there is some money to be made in being tricky, or no one would be doing it, but in my opinion, everyone comes out of this situation a loser. Why?

The public loses because the web is further polluted with flotsam and jetsam that is devoid of usefulness or real expertise. The business owner loses because he is wasting his own profits on a marketing strategy that will attach his name to idiotic documents across the web. Further, the next panda-esque debacle may include new sophistication that will render an increased number of content farms inert. The time and money invested will thus be voided. The marketing firm loses because it is risking being called out for selling bad product and it is making its money by offering the worst kind of education to its own clients. It may well be soliciting its own demise.

But Isn't There Any Value In Article Marketing Anymore?

We can debate this for days. I thought Michael Gray's 2011 article on post-Panda article marketing was pretty on-target, but frankly, I am still convinced that building out your own website's content brings greater rewards than handing it away to somebody else. There will, of course, be exceptions to this, and linkbuilding is every bit as much on the SEO table in 2012 as ever, but be honest with yourself about what you're actually doing.

I have found it exceptionally interesting to watch Social Media begin to sway the big discussion towards genuineness. Being real with your real audience, being accountable, being transparent and honest - these are the practices that are now being cited as carrying the richest long-term rewards. I can certainly recall the days of the really dumb bots of a decade ago, and confess I was even amused at some of the gaming going on, but remember this - the humans were never dumb.

All of this stuff your business is putting out there on the web - an audience is on the receiving end. That audience contains your potential customers. And, honestly, they are not going to be impressed by finding 6 versions of your story about pet allergies that cleverly substitute the word 'canine' for 'dog'. There are more intelligent ways to engage people.

We can do better than this.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.