By now, you have probably heard of Google’s latest update or might even have received the dreaded message from google in your webmaster tools … “We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

Part of the latest Google dance (From Panda to Penguin?) the aim of the search engine giant is to weed out the “bad” from the “good” so that when you make a search on Google, only the best websites will be shown to you.  If this means that all the “crap” content is going to be eliminated, then we can only applaud!

If you wonder how does google rank a website. then you might be interested in an article I wrote about this subject which draws on an explanation provided by Matt Cutts himself, and which makes for an interesting read, whether you are an “old hat” at online marketing, or a beginner.  To read this article, click here!

One of the things people have been doing in order to spread their message across as large an audience as possible is to write articles and post them on blog networks. There was so much garbage being posted that they brought absolutely nothing to the average reader and were just there to provide “link juice” to someone’s website.  For most of us they were more than a nuisance, so you can imagine what the folks at big G felt.  If you do not, here is an interesting article about what you should and should not do, provided by Google Webmaster Central

Spinning an article is a practice that can land you in trouble if you don’t do it well as this example provided by Google demonstrates:

… example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Why would you spin an article?

To maximize the exposure of your content by writing quality articles and syndicate them (cross post them) throughout.  But since syndication mostly mean that the same article (actually it’s not just articles, but any content) is reproduced time and again, the element of uniqueness comes into play and the second and subsequent following iteration of the same article begins to carry less weight in terms of the old Google love.

Hence the idea of article spinning… which is based on a very simple premise:

Write an article –> Spin it –> Post it

So what is spinning an article, and what does it mean to you?

The first thing to do obviously is to avoid doing the type of spinning mentioned in the above example!

You probably know what spinning an article is but just in case you don’t here is what I mean. I will use one sentence, spin it so that it may produce numerous versions of the same sentence, designed to “trick” the search engine into thinking that each new version was sufficiently different from the other to be considered unique.

Here goes.

Every morning, I take a walk.

If I add a synonym, word, expression or sentence that means the same thing, I get this:

{Every|Just about every|Each and every|Each} {morning|working day|day|day of the week}, {I|my spouse and I|we|my partner and I} {take a walk|take a stroll|go for a walk}.

This odd looking sentence can then be spun, using a spinning software to produce the following sentences.

 

  1. Just about every working day, my spouse and I take a stroll.
  2. Each and every day, we go for a walk.
  3. Each day of the week, my partner and I take a walk.
  4. Every morning, I take a stroll.
  5. Just about every working day, my spouse and I go for a walk.
  6. etc….

Clever spinning experts are able to be so intricate that they can produce tens, if not hundreds of different versions of an original.

When you look at the “spun version”  of the original article, you might think, cool, there are not the same sentences, there is no way a search engine will know what I am trying to do.

But won’t it?  I am not so sure.  I am convinced that Google and other search engines are getting as close as possible to that “unattainable” goal which is Artificial Intelligence, and they already have the technology that would enable them to know the various combination of synonyms each word can represent.  Do they have the means to independently analyze each one the millions or articles that get submitted each day?  Perhaps not, but it’s getting there.

So my advice to you would be that Article Spinning can still be a very powerful means of being able to spread your message and brand around, but you need to more conscience about you go about this particular task!