In the course of the daily research we do here at Wikimotive, we encounter a lot of the same questions over and over again. The pattern is pretty clear, everyone agrees on a subject and then Google performs another update and suddenly we have to reheat the same old gristle and see if it tastes any better this time around. The latest piece of inedible meat we’ve been encountering is the idea of content spinning. Since the late January Panda update, people seem to think that spinning the content on their blogs for marketing on Facebook or Twitter is a good idea.
It’s not.
We understand the appeal of content spinning. Who wouldn’t want to write a single article, spin it right round (like a record, baby) and then have another version, essentially doubling your unique content? The problem is that when you aren’t blogging for humans, humans can tell. Even the best article spinners read stilted and foreign. As an example, I ran the first paragraph of this blog through a spinner, and this is what I got:
Is that really something you want to associate with your name or your business?
I understand there are article spinners that are better than the one I used in the example, but they aren’t good enough. Even if you don’t care about your audience and you’re just spinning the articles so you have more content for backlinks, it’s STILL not a good idea. Google can tell when an article is spun, even if it’s spun well. You may get away with it for a month, or a year, or however long, but eventually they will find you, and they will penalize you.
I know another common strategy is to use a spinner and then assist it by selecting the best synonyms from lists it generates. This works a lot better and you might even get away with it, but at that point you’re doing so much work, you might as well just write more original content!