How To Spin Articles With Your Brain
Have you heard of article spinning software? It’s a simple idea. Article directories and search engines don’t like it when you submit duplicate content, so sometimes to create a lot of backlinks to your site, you have to create massive amounts of “unique” content that all delivers the same message. Article spinning software such as “Article Marketing Robot” or “The Best Spinner” allows you to subsitute groups of synonyms for words or word clusters, and automatically generate a variety of articles that approximate the same meaning.
There is enough article spinning software out there, and most of it works the same way. You just plug in your synonyms, and with varying degrees of proficiency the software produces dozens or even hundreds of articles to submit to article directories for the purpose of building backlinks. The various internet entities who would stand in the way of mass article submissions can all be satisfied that you’re publishing “unique” content, and if you do it right, you can do as much backlinking as you want.
I’ve played around with article spinning software. I’d never pay for it, but I’ve tried some free versions – there are enough of them out there. Spinz.me is a free browser-based spinner, and from what I can tell it works perfectly. I’m sure that the more advanced spinning software has some features that make the process easier, but what I’ve never understood is why anyone uses spinning software in the first place.
The world of computer-generated writing has come out with some interesting stuff. However, it is generally quite insane. Computers have made some major advances in synthesizing language in a way that seems natural, but we still haven’t mastered the art of more advanced synthetic composition that requires genuine creativity. Besides, all article spinning software does is substitute a bunch of words for other words, and in a way that doesn’t always make sense. If you use the software correctly, you’re supposed to read over the computer-generated text to make sure it makes sense. The human brain can do a much better job.
How Spinning Software Works
Here is an example of a sentence from my blog transformed using Spinz.me:
Original:
If it’s a piece of writing that you hope to publish one day, you might want to think twice about posting it somewhere just for exposure and feedback.
(1st spin:)
If we’re talking about a piece of writing that you aspire to submit for publication at some point, you could decide to reconsider publishing it just anywhere if you don’t have a good reason.
(2nd spin)
When dealing with anything online that you want to submit for publication at some point, you may be better off to reconsider publishing it somewhere only for exposure and feedback.
(3rd spin)
If it’s a piece of writing that you hope to submit for publication one day, you could decide to think twice about posting it for everyone to see only to gain some recognition.
To generate these three sentences which essentially say the same thing, I had to go through and pick phrases or words that I thought could safely be substituted for something else without compromising the meaning. Then I had to pick the phrases and words that could safely be subbed in by going through the sentence piece by piece. After that, I hit the spin button and got a bunch of random “unique” sentences that I then had to review to see if they made sense.
The three transformed sentences above don’t have any glaring errors except for the fact that their meaning isn’t as clear, and they don’t work as well in the context of the article. For example, I chose the synonyms “may, might and could,” but when we go back over the sentence we see that depending on the other synonyms that the spinner decided upon, the word ‘could’ doesn’t always make sense. We already have to do some editing.
There are other points when the spun sentences are unclear. For example, the word “publishing” doesn’t necessarily imply publishing on the web, the way that “posting” does in the context of the original article. To pick a synonym that works right often requires a contextual understanding of the entire article. Even then, once you’ve picked all your synonyms carefully, you still have to edit the results, because what worked with one set of synonyms might not work with another.
Why Your Brain Is Better
Undoubtedly the more article spinning you do, the better you get at it. But at the same time, the more of this you do, the more likely you are to let little things slide and forget about them. Since the ultimate purpose is to construct backlinks, if an article is slightly confusing or a little bit less than perfect, it isn’t going to make much difference. The only thing that matters in the end is whether someone reading the article could feasibly believe that it was written by a human.
Everything I read about mass article submission leads me to believe that it’s one of the riskiest SEO strategies still in common practice. You need to limit the number of backlinks that you build to your site so that crawlers perceive the linking activity as normal, organic growth. If you’re going to use massive amounts of spun content to construct backlinks, you need to link back to other content that then links back to your site. This way the ever-vigilant bots at Google won’t catch on to your attempt to deceive them because the number of links to any given blog or web property in your network appears to be natural.
This strategy reportedly works for niche keywords, and is often used to monetize search markets with Google AdSense and affiliate marketing schemes. For high competition keywords, backlinking needs to be done on much larger scale, and messing around with these volumes of backlinks without knowing what you’re doing is dangerous.
If you’re using articles for the anchor layer of your niche site, and then submitting them to social bookmarking sites or directories, you probably shouldn’t do too many of them. I’ve heard people say 5, 10, or 20 is the limit, but there is no real way to know where Google draws the line. In any case, the volume of content in anchor layer links doesn’t have to be any more than a human brain can handle.
The same sentence from above:
Original: If it’s a piece of writing that you hope to publish one day, you might want to think twice about posting it somewhere just for exposure and feedback.
1st Brainspin: You should be cautious about posting anything on the web that you might want a publisher to pick up one day – especially if you don’t stand to gain anything from it.
2nd Brainspin: Be careful – anything you post on the web is unlikely to ever be formally published. Make sure that it’s worth your while to forfeit that possibility.
3rd Brainspin: If you want to submit the work to publishing houses, you should know that they rarely pick up anything that’s been on the web. Weigh the benefits of your posting activity accordingly.
Compared to what it took using spinning software, it took me about one quarter of the time to generate the 3 spun sentences above, and they all fit better into the context of the article. Software can save you some time when you’re dealing in especially high volumes, but the creativity of the human brain can more than match the efficiency of spinning software on a smaller scale.
In today’s search markets, brain-spun articles are far more valuable than anything that spinning software can deliver. If you want to do anything close to white-hat SEO, article spinning software is becoming less and less effective and more and more risky. For niche sites and high-risk strategies, this type of software may still have practical applications, but in most cases the necessary investment to produce truly original content for SEO is not substantially greater than is required for spinning software.
What spinning software lacks that the human brain has is the ability to capture the gist of a sentence, phrase, or paragraph, and caste it in entirely new terms. With a focused and creative mind, you can rewrite articles more effectively than any software on the market.
