Last week I talked about Cheap SEO and touched on some of the Unethical Tactics that Black Hat SEO’s will do. It inspired me to want to talk about Content Spinning and why you need to be cautious of your SEO provider doing it to your site. Is unethical? Depends on who you ask and we’ll talk more about that in this article.
Content Spinning
Content is an expensive part of SEO. On top of the research, analytical review, keyphrase creation, your SEO provider will also have to create content. No, it will likely not be the same kind of content you would get if you worked with a copywriter or a blogger, although those types of writers may likely provide content as part of the SEO package. Writing content isn’t easy. You need to be creative, understand SEO, search engine readability, and also how to connect with different audiences. A lot of SEO’s aren’t writers and a lot of writers are SEO’s. So when you hire cheap SEO providers how do they afford the writers?
In most cases, they don’t.
You’re paying for content spinning.
What is Content Spinning?
Content Spinning is repurposing the same piece of content for one client over, and over, and over, and over for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of clients. By using a computer program and the content from a blog or webpage, the software rewrites the content piece. Synonyms and grammatical changes are implemented, not from a human to change shuffle the content so that it’s still readable.
“Search engine optimization is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine” Let’s say this was used on a site.
“The process of improving the quality and volume of traffic on your webpages is search engine optimization. In this practice, we improve the visibility of your online content to optimize for search engine queries” Here’s how I wrote the same message with my human brain.
Here are 3 examples of spinning the last spun response
- “Site design improvement is the way toward developing the quality and amount of site traffic by expanding the perceivability of a site or a site page to clients of a web search tool”
- “Webpage structure improvement is the path toward building up the quality and measure of website traffic by extending the detectable quality of a webpage or a website page to customers of a web search instrument”
- “Site page structure improvement is the way toward working up the quality and proportion of site traffic by expanding the perceptible nature of a page or a site page to clients of a web search instrument”
You get the point.
Why Is It Bad?
When Google updated to Penguin, they improved their algorithms for detecting “Low-quality, duplicate content” or “spam content” which are things that are also produced as a byproduct to content spinning. Google wants authenticity and fresh content and finds that spinning is a form of generating poor content that Google does not want to rank. Google is making more and more shift to quality content, even over keyword saturation, so expect content spinning to be penalized to greater extents as updates occur.
It’s also poor to read. I’m not saying my own rewrite was the best thing since sliced bread but it’s easier to read. It’s clear and it’s engaging. Spinning produces more generic content that’s less clear to readers. Not only that, but it’s obvious which pieces were spun and which was original. Your users won’t get the best experience with the spun content due to its’ universal nature. SEO content is sometimes more about saturation and it’s always the best for readability but spun content is generally very poor in quality. I mean, there’s only so many ways you, mathematically, can spin the same pieces of content.
Is It Unethical?
Google obviously thinks so, therefore many SEO’s believe it is as well. I am one of them. If you wrote the original content and spin it, it’s not illegal. You’re then just providing “a haystack of low-quality blog networks and article repositories” If you spin content you did not author, you are plagiarizing. But if you spin something you didn’t write, it’s then a moral and legal issue. Many website owners have this and don’t even know it. They won’t know it until Google penalizes them or the original writer discovers it and sends a C&D letter (far less likely to happen.)
What are your thoughts on content spinning? If you find it ethical and practice it, I would love to hear your experiences as well! For content like this and more, let’s connect on Facebook. If you need more help, have more questions, or are interested in human written content, Summon the Rebel Fleet and let’s chat!