Article Spinning, Good or Bad?

Ken's Blog

If you are not adding value to the Web by creating your own original article content, you're on the wrong track.

If you are doing something purely for the Search Engines, you're on the wrong track.

If you are duplicating content, making small changes here and there so Google won't realize it, and submitting it to a variety of locations, you're taking the wrong track off the wrong track.

As matter of fact, if you read any guru or service giving advice or selling software to implement a strategy and they use the phrase "to avoid detection by Google not that this is wrong or anything"...

You are now on the road to Google hell.  It was never paved with good intentions. Sooner or later, your income will disappear. And, since the income was based on not creating true value, there never was any equity in your business.

Article marketing boils down to these questions...

• What are you doing?
• Why are you doing it? (Is it real or just for the engines?)
• Are you adding value?
• If you were Google, would you consider this article to be good, original content? Really?

The practice of shuffling a few sentences and using a few synonyms doesn't cut it. Some article clubs suggest you take their articles and "customize," saying the more you customize, the better. That is so sleazy and self-serving -- when you get nailed, they'll say that you did not customize enough. Ugh.

And if you have to customize that much.... wouldn't it just be better to write your own material from scratch?

There's a big gray zone between obvious content spam and pure, original high-value material. And the only bottom line answer is that article-spinning is kind of like pornography...

It may be hard to define exactly, but I know it when I see it.

Stay away from it, or you will suffer the same fate that I said the sploggers would face last year. Sure enough, creating hundreds of fake mini-sites with fake link networks is being crushed by Google. So many of the sploggers who attacked us last year by writing fake "site build it scam" reviews are now writing material that sounds very SBI!-ish... write real content, build large authority sites, etc., etc.

I take no pleasure in their pain, only in helping you stay out of pain.

Here's the bottom line...

No trick that is meant to manipulate the engines to deliver sub-optimal search results has survived. Think about this...

There is you. And there are hundreds of truly brilliant computer science PhDs whose very lives are all about search.

Any guru who thinks he can stay a step ahead of them with tricks is delusional.

So ignore the gurus who claim that content-spamming or article-spinning or (whatever the next big thing) is THE way. If it works at all, it will be short-lived.

I promise that they will be singing the same blues that the sploggers are. Some will be outraged, which I find outrageous, because Google does not owe you a living. You have to earn it.

So... do not want/hope that what you are doing is "OK." Take a hard look at it and subject it to the tests that I mentioned above.

All the best,

P.S. If I was in charge of Google Spam, I'd ask the geeks to send me all pages with terms like "avoid detection by Google" just to see what the latest tricks are. Just kidding, of course, because by the time these tricks are public, Google already knows about them and the effectiveness is wearing off.

So I'd use that information and post what those tricks are and that Google is already at x% effective in defeating a certain trick, and that soon it will be 100% effective. That would help the poor people who are taken in by charlatans selling anything that has a component of "avoiding detection."

By the way...

The bad guys do not give away the latest trick that works, let alone sell it. They stay quiet and use it while it works. They give away the stuff that is on the down-slope of effectiveness, drawing you in with something that sounds good. Then they sell you tons of useless software to implement that spam at crazy prices. Don't fall for it.