Article spinning is what many would call a black-hat SEO strategy, a trick to deceive search engine bots and spiders into “thinking” that the semantic structure of a plagiarized piece of content is readable to humans, and even valuable to humans.
Article spinning software sales pages may claim “unique content” generation, passable even to the most recent search engine updates.
In this post, we will illustrate the 3 reasons that spun articles are not without consequences.
#1 REASON – Physical harm may result due to invalid, corrupt or misconstrued advice
This is not far off, seeing how readable some spun articles are today.
Very readable spun articles may lead to serious consequences, such as physical harm to an innocent reader, or other parties.
For example: an article spinner user creates a medical blog with a single intent — to make as much Adsense income as possible, and as fast as possible. They build a site gradually using auto-publish plugins and spinning software. At the end of one year, they have 300 spun articles on the blog.
But they may never consider what their article spinning software is stealing, mangling and corruptly publishing onto the public blog.
The result? When an innocent reader stumbles onto the website, they follow what appear to be sound self-treatment steps. Perhaps the spinning software switched a synonym where dosage was being written about, or it combined two pieces of advice from several sources.
The software doesn’t understand what it’s doing, but the spin software user should beware: spinning has consequences, though it may not immediately be visible.
In days past, this would have been entirely unlikely, but we have read some very convincing spun articles which often sound quite authoritative. Examples of blogs that shouldn’t be spun (just a few):
- Financial blogs spun by software could lead to financial decision making that is harmful
- Medical blogs spun by software could lead to harmful self-care decisions
- Relationships blogs spun by software could lead to harmful decisions of a personal nature
#2 REASON – Spun articles may actually infringe on copyrights.
Perhaps some users of spinning software do not realize there are copyrights they are violating when they use spinning software. But there are. Many authority websites that publish regular blogs have a clear notice at the bottom of the site that all written content on their website is copyrighted:
This means a very serious consequence of spinning may be a law suit.
We haven’t heard of spinners being sued that often in the media, but that may be something in the future.
#3 REASON – Spun articles leave a feeling of betrayal and mistrust
Reading a spun article may lead to a real feeling of betrayal.
For example: When an innocent user finds a blog with what appears to be a useful article, they soon realize they have wasted their effort and time on the site because it contains largely meaningless scrambles of words and phrases, designed to deceive search engine bots.
That they would be deceived into reading the article, leaves a feeling of being lied to and betrayed.
Even people who purchase articles from places like Textbroker and Fiverr can attest to the feeling of betrayal when a seller chooses to provide a spun article instead of writing it on their own, as they had promised.
This not only destroys trust between two people working together, it creates an atmosphere of mistrust in online marketplaces for content – and in entire web industries.
Conclusion
While the sales pages of article spinning software may sound persuasive, article spinning tools mostly produce plagiarized, non-unique articles.
The average web user’s experience with spun blogs may certainly contain frustration and betrayal. But in cases of medical advice being spun, as we gave example in this blog post, spun blogs and articles may lead to far more serious experiences.
We will have to wait to see if there will be legislation to curb the use of spinners.
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