We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Article Spinning".
Websites with the highest ranking in the SERP tend to also have a lot of pages. Each additional page added to a website creates extra visibility in the search engines. This visibility happens simply because you are giving them more information and more words to help categorize your website.
Most news websites rank highly for a variety of topics. CNN.com and MSNBC.com are highly ranked for many random keywords simply because a keyword phrase was mentioned in an article. Your local newspaper will also rank highly for local searches and local topics.
There will be a time when you want, or need to have your website rank for new keyword phrases or perhaps you just want to have higher ranking for one of your existing keyword phrases. To accomplish this, you will need to add more information to your website. To use website terminology, you need to "add more web pages with new content" or you can simply say you need to "add content."
Blog posts and monthly educational information about jewelry or gemstones are among the best types of content to continuously add to a jewelry website. Writing that stuff takes time and we understand that most jewelry store owners don't have that time.
It takes about 1 hour to creatively write something new and add it to your website. Ideally, if you really want your website to attract new business, you should be posting at least 1 new page of content every week. We also understand that 1 hour quickly turned into 2 hours when you include in normal business interruptions. Eventually, you just want to throw up your hands and give up.
That feeling of defeat leads people to search for those sleazy SEO techniques that are much faster than doing it yourself. Those sleazy techniques are "Article Spinning" and "Thin Content."
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of websites that specialize in collecting articles from people. You, as a professional jeweler, could write a 250 to 400 word educational article about sapphires and their multitude of colors and submit it to an article website yourself.
The benefit for you is that your article would have links to your website, and it creates recognition of your name. Sometime in the future, someone will need that information about sapphires and they might find your article. More obscure article topics tend to attract quality readers. Many companies will take entire articles and include them in monthly newsletters as content filler. This also gives you professional recognition.
It's pretty easy to copy an article from EzineArticles.com or one of the other quality article companies; in fact, you might think it's easier to go looking for an article on sapphires instead of writing one yourself.
And that's where you would be wrong!
Google knows that people copy articles all the time. These article websites are so popular that Google had to create a filtering program (called Panda) to deal with the multitude of copies.
Copying an article from another website is nothing more than duplicating pre-existing website content.
Google hates that.
All search engines hate that.
In fact, most consumers hate it when they are looking for those pear-cut yellow sapphires and all they keep finding is that same crappy articles repeated on dozens of websites. Some people will slightly change the words, or use software to mix the words around a little (that's the "spinning" part) but it's all the same information over and over again.
All website content should add value to the internet. If it's not new information, you should not be using it on your site. In early 2011, Google shook up a lot of website ranking and penalized everyone who had copied articles posted to their site.
Article Copying/Spinning = Bad
Be careful when hiring an outside SEO agency to build content on your website. You need to ask them specifically what they will be doing, and what their article source material will be. If they use the phrase "article marketing" you need to make sure they are talking about creating unique articles for your website only. If they use the phrase "article spinning" you probably should run the other way.
