In this edition of Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping back to September 2011 and the topic of Article Spinning.
To understand what Article Spinning is you must first understand the importance of having a blog on your website. My avid followers will already know that I'm all about the blogging. High value blogging content... High value blog content that you post on your main website!
Times have changed since I wrote that previous Nugget about Article Spinning. In it, I said that it might take you 1 hour to write a decent blog post that would be considered high value. I also said it might take 2 hours if you get interrupted while writing it.
After a few years of doing this, it now takes me at least 90 minutes to write each of my own blog posts (these fine Daily Golden Nuggets), but then it takes another 30 minutes to have them edited, and at least another 90 minutes for them to be scheduled in email and posted to social networks. Mine is a process that involves three people.
We have the process fine tuned now. Every blog we write is unique and posted a single time. Occasionally, I'll get a request from another news source to repost one of my Daily Nuggets. I always allow those single reposts because it's only one time and it helps lead people back to my website.
A common SEO practice in the past was to take a single blog post and change a few words, move sentences around, or completely rewrite it several times. This rewriting process is called "spinning," thus the name Article Spinning.
Those spun articles would then be posted on dozens of random blogging websites with links pointing back to your main website.
The goal was to flood the search engines with similar written content that lead readers back to your website. However, the spun articles were usually so poorly written that most readers found them unintelligible and forced.
Article Spinning was a Black Hat SEO technique that brought a lot of business for a short time to those who employed it.
Over time people started complaining about the poor readability of this content and the search engines figured out a way to filter it from search results.
I sympathize that it takes a long time to write a single blog post, and it's tempting to rewrite the same topic a few times to share on different websites, but it's a bad idea.
Blogging short cuts like this will only hurt you. Don't do it.
