Content spinning is an important topic for anyone who authors, purchases, or publishes blog posts, articles or other web content online as it can have real implications for the performance of your website.
Knowing what content spinning is and how to recognize spun content can make all the difference, to keeping you on the right side of the search engines.
So, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at spinning content and find out if it is a legitimate way of producing content for your site.
In addition, we will take a look at the emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) content writing software and establish whether the type of content generated by these bots is spun.
To spin or not to spin?
For you, content writing may be either a pleasure or a chore, but I am sure we can agree that producing great articles, blog posts and reviews takes up a lot of time and is a big part of developing an online business.
As an affiliate marketer, content writing is the bread and butter of my trade but time is money and I am always looking for solutions that will help me fill my sites with informative and engaging content without spending hours typing.
According to HubSpot’s Not Another State of Marketing Report 2021, it takes anywhere between 1 and 4 hours to produce a single 500-800 word blog post.
At this rate, maintaining momentum in content production on just a single website would be more than a full-time job, and that’s if writing good content comes naturally.
Therefore it is no surprise that the road to content marketing success is littered with a variety of shortcuts and hacks designed to save or buy back your time while keeping your blogs up to date.
One of these strategies is the practice of content spinning, a controversial one I know, but a technique that many bloggers turn to to try and turn out new content at a faster rate.
What is content spinning?
Content spinning is the practice of taking a piece of written content, like a blog or article and using the words within it to generate one or more variant articles. It is also known as article spinning.
The variant articles produced by content spinning are similar to the original piece of writing, but not so similar that they could be considered plagiarized or duplicated.
The spinning is achieved by taking the structure, format, ideas and language of the original text and substituting alternate words, phrasing, syntax and even reordering and rewriting the paragraphs to make a new article that is distinct in enough areas to not be recognizable as the original.
But in the case of content spinning, there is nothing new under the sun. The spun content does not include any new information or ideas and entirely draws from the original.
Content spinning has been performed for ages by writers, particularly students looking to turn out an essay quickly.
Some professional copywriters may also utilize this approach to provide content to clients, especially if they are working in content mills.
But the internet age has seen content spinning become an industry of its own with the creation of spinning software that has been designed to scrape content from the internet and reword and spin multiple articles and posts, usually for SEO purposes.
Why are people spinning content?
I think that this rinse and repeat approach to content writing is primarily because it saves time.
And as time equals money, the low cost of producing spun content is appealing too. As an SEO technique, it arose out of the black hat SEO and spamdexing practices, where manually written or automated spinning could be used to generate and rank thousands of similar landing pages quickly.
SEOs and web developers rely on content as part of their work but may not be the best of writers meaning that they will actively look to outsource content, with spinning being an extremely quick and convenient option.
Spinning software that was capable of cheating plagiarism software and search engines was routinely downloaded and used.
Black hat SEOs have confessed that until the major Google algorithm updates of the mid-2010s spinning was routinely used on the net, across sectors, subjects, and industries.
Is it [content spinning] legal?
Content spinning is unlikely to be something that anyone is going to readily admit to as it is all about deceiving the search engine that what has been produced is an entirely new article.
It also necessitates the theft of someone else’s original content on which the spun articles will be based.
As you would expect, Google takes a dim view of these practices.
Using spun content in your website can quickly lead you to run foul of Google. It is considered a manipulative practice and earns manual actions or penalties.
This is because Google’s priority is to provide a high-quality user experience that is rich in original information.
Thin, low-quality content has little value to users and therefore will be actively marked down.
If the respun content can be detected by Google it may designate it as spam, duplicate content, or thin content and in the worst-case de-list your entire website.
The only way you can ensure that you won’t receive such penalties is to use original content for every page that adds something new.
Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) writing software Spun Content?
Despite the risks, the convenience and cheapness of content spinning make it a real temptation for many website owners.
Artificial Intelligence tools that will spin content are still widely available with bot-based programs rewriting an article hundreds of times to try to trick the bots of Google.
A quick online search will turn up a variety of software tools, like SpinBot and SpinnerChief that will scrape the net or text you supply to spin content.
The quality of writing that is produced is coherent but poor and may struggle to engage visitors to your site.
However…
Artificial Intelligence writing is not the same as content spinning, and many legitimate artificial intelligence software programs are engineered to generate original informative, engaging, and most importantly, spam-free content for your blogs.
What is the difference between Artificial Intelligence writing and content spinning software?
The technology and programming that underpin artificial intelligence writing are completely different to the programming that is used by content spinning software.
More unscrupulous content spinners will say that their software is AI-driven, but this is not the case.
Content spinning software is extremely primitive
Spinners use none of the deep learning techniques of a genuine AI writing software.
Spinners simply vary a piece of supplied content by inserting alternative words, phrases, and sentences.
Context and understanding of what is written are limited so the results achieved with spinners vary wildly and are often unreadable.
On the other hand AI writing uses sophisticated Natural Language Generation technology to create its original works.
AI writing software differs from unscrupulous spinning bots chiefly because it has done its homework, using complex deep learning or machine learning methods.
The commercially available AI software is based on Natural Language Generation (NLG) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) that do not require a source text but use a rule-based approach to generated natural-sounding writing that is based on the study of hundreds of thousands of varied pieces of writing so that the content produced sounds authentic and engaging.
Conversion.ai’s content writing bot Jarvis is a great example of a computer program that will write rather than spin articles for you.
If you are keen to harness the power of technology to save you time on producing quality content, Conversion.ai has a reputable AI software that produces original content that is specifically designed to be high converting.
Their software, named Jarvis, has been programmed or trained by leading software developers alongside marketers and real copywriters.
In 2019, Jarvis read the entire internet. Well, the 10% of the internet that is public. 90% of the internet is private
Their inputs mean that Jarvis can deliver high-quality writing in the most widely used formats online including blog posts, Google Ads, Amazon product descriptions, and landing pages. I talk a little bit more about it here:
The sophistication and specificity of this premium writing assistant cannot be matched by a spinner and the AI bot is as agile in producing both short and long-form content.
Test Jarvis for free and see for yourself. Get 10’000 free words to play around with.
This AI writer is as quick and convenient as a spinner without the downsides!
By using an Artificial Intelligence wringing software like Conversion.ai you will definitely save time.
Bring along your keywords and article ideas and enter them into the program and Jarvis will do all the hard work, including suggesting suitable titles for your content piece.
I’ve tested AI content from Jarvis through Copyscape and it passed with flying colors!
My websites are my livelihood and there is no way in which I would risk their performance and profitability by putting poor quality content in them.
Having used Conversion.ai in certain areas of my content generation, I’ve found that it has great utility, particularly for those short-form content chores like YouTube or meta descriptions.
If you want to learn more about how AI content works, check out my video on YouTube where I run through 10 of the best legitimate Ai content writing tools on the net:
