Ever wondered “What is Article Spinning?”  As many of you know, I have been working with some new article marketing software lately. It is really cool, and has a number of advanced features. One of the important features is called “article spinning.”  If you are new to article marketing, you may not be familiar with spinning, so I thought I would describe it here.

Spinning Defined

Spinning is something that you do (or usually you get software to do) to an article to create multiple versions that are seen as unique in the search engines.  This search optimization method can range from totally black hat (in the case where you are generating random junk) to white hat (in the case where every article you generate is truly unique and  valuable).

What I will describe below is a “gray hat” use of spinning.  The goal in this example would be to take a decent base article, spin it, and create many versions that say the same thing but look unique in the search engines.  By my definition, it is “gray hat” because a reader that read 3 different versions of the same article would not get any more information that a reader that read one version.  It is not black hat because the resulting articles are pretty decent, and it is not white hat because each generated article is not uniquely valuable.

The reason that you might want to do this is to avoid detection of your content as “duplicate content” when it is sent to multiple search engines.  I should note that the impact of duplicate content is not clear, and I am not taking a position on that here.  Some people argue that duplicate content it not important.   My opinion is that Google is not able to do a good job suppressing most duplicate content now, but that it is just a matter of time.  So, some spinning is a great idea (and there is some great spinning software available in the marketplace).

Simple Spinning Example

The best way to answer the “what is article spinning” question is with an example.  Consider the following text:

Spot is a {red|blue|yellow} stuffed {dog|cat|bear}.

I the above example, curly braces surround text that can be chosen at random.  For example, {red|blue|yellow} means that when you read the sentence, you can choose to substitute one of the three colors listed in the sentence.  When a sentence is spun (like the one above), a software spinner can therefore create a unique version of the sentence on the fly.  In the above example, 9 unique combination are possible by selecting a word a random from each {set}.

Spot is a red stuffed dog.
Spot is a red stuffed cat.
Spot is a red stuffed bear.
Spot is a blue stuffed dog.
Spot is a blue stuffed cat.
Spot is a blue stuffed bear.
Spot is a yellow stuffed dog.
Spot is a yellow stuffed cat.
Spot is a yellow stuffed bear.

If you do an entire article with sentences spun in this way, then you can create articles that look completely unique in the eyes of the search engines.

Here is what a real article about migraine headaches might  look like:

A silent migraine or acephalgic is a type of headache where {no pain persists|there is no persistent pain|pain does not persist}. It is a medical oddity but is not that {unusual|uncommon|hard to find}. This type of migraine is only reported by 15% of {migraine patients|people suffering from migraines|migraine sufferers} and is still an area of {concern|worry}. These {usually occur|often occur|are most often seen} with older patient and are reported more by men than women.

Amount of Spinning

Now that you know the answer to “What is article spinning”, the next question is how much should you spin?  Some people will argue that the above amount of spinning is not enough to guarantee uniqueness, and I tend to agree.   You can spin much more aggressively.  Often people will spin entire paragraphs and will also “nest” spin commands.  Nesting means that they spin within a spin — like this:

Tom is a {red {dog|cat}|blue{mouse|horse}}

This leads to these possible cases:

Tom is a red dog.

Tom is a red cat.

Tom is a blue mouse.

Tom is a blue horse.

You can go completely crazy with spinning.  All that is required is  good article marketing software that supports complicated constructions.

My recommendation is to consider some light spinning in cases where you are planning to use automated article marketing software to distribute many copies of the same article to many article directories.  I further recommend that if you are going to spin anything, you should spin the title (which will be used in the title tag) and the back link anchor text.  If I were Google, identical anchor text and title tags would be the very first thing that I would look for to detect duplicate content.

Got a question about spinning, article spinning software, or article marketing or duplicate content?  Drop me a comment below.

Regards,
Mark