Seriously, you would think we could get over this already. There was once a time when you could put a bunch of keywords at the bottom of your site’s pages and they would jump to the top of the search engine rankings. It was the beginning of the web, a time before the advent of Google when the few people who called themselves webmasters had total dominance over the content delivered to the masses.
It was during these years (1997 to be more exact) when people got the impression that you could play games with the search engines, and you could win. That’s because people did win, and they won big. Sites rose to popularity overnight just because someone knew the next clever trick to play on the search engines. It was a good time to be in the content business because quality didn’t matter. You could produce oodles of SPAM and make lots of money off of it.
The same games don’t work anymore.
And then the elephant named Google walked into the room and changed the game forever. Suddenly, simply having lots of keywords in your content didn’t mean it would reach the top. You actually had to earn links from other sites, and those sites that linked to you had to have a good reputation. SPAM sites practically disappeared overnight, and quality content became king.
The same is true today, much to chagrin of people who are still living in the late ‘90s. As search engines develop more and more advanced programs to examine content and determine if it is legitimate, the prospect of playing games with the search engines becomes ever more grim. Nevertheless, content developers still cling to the notion that they can somehow “crack the code” and get to the top of Google without earning it.
Article Spinning, A Euphemism For Online Sweatshop.
Gone are the days of invisible keywords and illegitimate links. Welcome to the era of article spinning, a time when the online world becomes a content sweatshop that is certain to give carpal tunnel to anyone crazy enough to write at the speed of SPAM. If you aren’t familiar with this practice, it means taking an original article and writing it a dozen different ways to capture all of the possible searches people might enter into Google. As long as each article is different enough from all of the others, Google will accept the article into its index.
Article spinning is the modern equivalent of the shotgun approach. Instead of writing a few high quality articles that are likely to get linked to, you hire people from all over the world to write hundreds of them with the vain hope that a few of them will succeed and become popular. Quality clearly isn’t a concern here. It’s a simple matter of getting the content out there first.
From an actual SEO standpoint, this is suicide. Almost none of these articles are even readable. Nobody links to them because they’re very poorly written, and they don’t offer any unique or new information. To make things worse, even when some of these pages do get a few links, the links they get are distributed across the all of the pages. Instead of having one page that competes with the top contenders, you now have a bunch of pages that can’t compete with anyone. You have become the jack of all trades and master of none.
Even if you win the battle today, you will lose the war tomorrow. Google will find a way to penalize article spinners, and when they do, you will see a drop in your rankings. It is always best to align your goals with the goals of the major search engines. They run the show. When they decide that your spam-filled site isn’t helping their users get the content they want, they will happily pull the plug.