You may have heard a lot recently about spinning articles as an SEO tactic. Well, spinning articles is a relatively new concept, and with a rush to make money selling you spinning tools and spinning services, it’s worth giving you the skinny on this whole spinning thing.
Let’s look at…
- What is spinning?
- Why bother spinning?
- Automated spinning.
- Manual spinning.
- My thoughts and recommendations.
What is article spinning?
Spinning is a very simple concept. It means taking a single article and creating hundreds of unique articles from it.
The idea is simple. You have done some research – collected data, gotten quotes, put together some resources – and you have put your thoughts together. You have spent an hour or two preparing a great article to submit to article directories. But you want to put out hundreds of unique articles, unique content, not carbon copy duplicate content.
That’s what spinning is. Harnessing the energy you’ve put into creating a single article, and creating hundreds of articles from it. Let me give you a simple example of spinning. We’ll use the example of an article promoting a blog on Vitamin D supplements. Let us suppose the original blog post began like this:
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be beneficial to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
To spin this post into two articles, you just have to give two versions of one of the words, like this:
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be [spin]beneficial|helpful[/spin] to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
The specific syntax I am using if based on the Free Traffic System, because it’s a tool I use continuously. Syntax varies from tool to tool, but the idea is the same. This spinning creates two “unique” articles, each with a slightly different first sentence.
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be beneficial to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be helpful to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
But that’s not very unique. So, make two versions of another word:
New evidence shows [spin]how|that[/spin] vitamin D might be [spin]beneficial|helpful[/spin] to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
The sentence above is, technically, four different sentences. When this sentence is fed through an article submitter that recognizes spin code, it comes out as four different “unique” sentences at four different article directories or blogs:
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be beneficial to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be helpful to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows how vitamin D might be beneficial to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows how vitamin D might be helpful to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
The math is simple: two words, each with two options, creates 4 “unique” sentences. OK, that gives four versions of the article, but still not very unique. Try this one:
New evidence shows [spin]how|that[/spin] vitamin D might be [spin]beneficial|helpful|useful[/spin] to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
Two options multiplied by three options gives 6 “unique” sentences.
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be beneficial to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be helpful to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be useful to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows how vitamin D might be beneficial to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows how vitamin D might be helpful to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows how vitamin D might be useful to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
One more…
New [spin]evidence|data[/spin] shows [spin]how|that|why[/spin] vitamin D might be [spin]beneficial|helpful|useful[/spin] to [spin]ward off|prevent|fight against[/spin] bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
The concept of article spinning, just to belabour the point one more time, holds that just with this one paragraph spun as above, there will be 54 “unique” articles (2x3x3x3) on 54 websites, each one pointing links back to your website. And that is juts by spinning the first paragraph. If you spin throughout the article, you will create so many random versions of the article that you will end up using only a fraction – which helps make them more unique.
That is spinning in a nutshell
That is also spinning the way the automated spinner tools and scripts spin things. The problem is, if you really believe you need unique content every place your blog post-turned-article shows up, is that any algorithm armed with a thesaurus (Does Google have access to a thesaurus, can see from a mile away that all these single words are in fact the same. To the human eye, you have created hundreds, maybe even thousands of unique articles that might appear to be identical to Google. Indeed, they might appear to be a tricky attempt to make duplicate content look unique. No big deal if you’re the only one doing it. But what if enough people – including spammers – are doing it and actually affecting Google’s search results? How would a thesaurus-armed Google look upon such attempts to fool it?
For that reason, I recommend creating articles that actually are unique – articles that even a Thesaurus won’t recognize. This means a little extra work (always a trade off between efficiency and quality – yes, I know).
Here are the step we take when manually spinning articles for better quality SEO:
1. Titles are most important. Write unique titles from scratch. At least 50 of them. Many are similar, but many are quite different. Our keyword in prominent in most of them, but not in all
2. The first sentence is pretty important, so I tend to write 3 or 4 versions of it in completely different style – passive, active, first person, third person, etc. (In other words, spin the whole sentence, not just individual words.)
3. Do the same for entire paragraphs. Take a paragraph, then rewrite it so that it is longer. Then rewrite it so that it is two or even paragraphs. Skip this if you are pressed for time, but remember that the more you change the more unique each article will be.
4. At least once in your article, rewrite a long paragraph as a short paragraph followed by a bullet list. It helps to create a few versions of the list, changing the order of the bullets and even removing some of them in some versions. Bullet lists are often the easiest to play around with, because you can change the order of the bullets so easily, or add or remove individual bullets at will..
5. When rewriting a word, don’t always choose a single word as a replacement option. For example…
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be [spin]beneficial|a helpful form of protection|useful – especially for people in warmer climates -[/spin] to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
This gives you:
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be beneficial to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be a helpful form of protection to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
New evidence shows that vitamin D might be useful – especially for people in warmer climates – to ward off bat bites, according to preliminary results of a study in Ethiopia.
Replacing a single word with a variety of different length phrases, changes the word count in the sentence, the paragraph and the article; to some degree, it also changes the article structure, making it more unique than just replacing words with synonyms.
6. When creating options, more is better. In 5. above, the example has three options, much better than two, but not as good as four or five. There is a time versus uniqueness trade-off here, but if you can create more than just two or three options, especially in the first few paragraphs, it helps make your articles more unique.
7. Let’s end with one of the most important places to have variation – your linked text. Vary the pages the links point to, vary the link text, vary the surrounding text. Most article directories give you two links in your resource box, so vary which one comes first.
Nothing I have had to say here should be taken as “The Truth”. This is all a big trade-off, and it assumes that duplicate content pages give less link value than unique content pages. But nobody know just how unique a page needs to be to make a difference.
Now, a confession. I planned to spin much of my original blog post on spinning for this post, but in fact, this post is only partly spun – most of this guest post was written from scratch. Spinning for article directories in a common SEO tactic – but it’s just not appropriate for guest posting, even when spinning a post on “spinning”.