Article Spinning for SEO

'Article spinning' is something you may have seen mentioned in relation to SEO or to website content in general - in fact, it also sometimes goes under the names of 'content spinning' or simply 'copy spinning'.

It stems from the need to populate your website's pages with unique content - so that you don't fall foul of Google's "some pages very similar to those already shown..." filter, and vanish from the SERPs completely.

The problem with article spinning is simply finding the best way to do it. There are automatic systems that use thesaurus software to inject synonyms throughout a piece of text, but these are notoriously hit and miss.

(Actually, at this point, let me tell you about Kindergangster...)

Kindergangster.de

There are loads of article repositories out there - usually with generic-sounding names like 'articledirectory.eu' or something.

Kindergangster.de was a little different. For a start, I have no idea what it was trying to achieve. Its articles spanned the full range of topics from dieting and good parenting, to retail in general.

However, they had been auto-spun, with disastrous consequences.

Click here to open the Wayback archive's one and only record of Kindergangster.de, and be prepared for something that is mostly nonsense.

But scan down and you discover that the thesaurus used in this case considered "love" and "fuck" to have the same meaning.

That led to claims like: "Even when you are in financial trouble, the job can't verify antecedency over the kids. They need to know how essential they are to you. They need to know you fuck them more than anything else."

It's an extreme example of the perils of auto-spun articles, but it's a genuine example.

Professional Article Spinning

I spent five years working at an online news agency that had separated out the main functions of the journalism role.

That is to say, press releases were received by email or by RSS feed, and sorted into topic area either automatically or by dedicated individuals.

Meanwhile, a team of researchers conducted telephone interviews and made the transcripts available to the editorial staff, and other researchers headed out to major industry events to get the viewpoint from 'on the ground', as they say.

As an editorial employee, that meant the vast majority of my source material - whether it was a press release, an interview transcript or some other form of information - was in written form.

I spent five years effectively article spinning 25-30 times a day (sometimes more - my record for an eight-hour working day was 49 articles. My record output in what I consider to be a single stretch was about 101 articles, although I did sleep for an hour or two with my laptop resting on my chest during that day-and-a-half session).

It's not all about pace, but my ability to construct a grammatically correct, typo-free, 175-word article in four minutes did lead to me being referred to as "a machine" on more than one occasion.

However, I'm not a machine - I'm a human, and that means I can make judgment calls on issues like, for example, whether 'fuck' is an acceptable synonym for 'love'.

The Cost

I typically charge for article spinning at my usual copywriting rate - which is explained on my pricing page - but I'm open to negotiation.

For instance, if you supply the source material, I may be able to spin your content much faster than if any original research is required. Likewise, if you need the same content spinning into three or four grammatically distinct articles, I may be able to drop the total price as it shouldn't take as long as four truly unique articles would take.

Whatever you need, get in touch and see if I can help - I am truly flexible on many parts of the process, and always happy to help.