Today’s post is inspired by Melissa Lyn, a recent blog commentator who asked this:

“Can you tell me a little about article spinning and is it an important part to successful SEO?”

When I began replying to her within the comment thread, I realized I had so much to say that I decided to make a blog post out of it instead so that I could answer it more thoroughly. I hope both you and Melissa find the information useful.

What is Article Spinning?

Article spinning is when you take an article and spin it by changing some of the words with synonyms so it has the same meaning or by re-writing some of the sentences or paragraphs. The goal is to take one article and spin it so that you have another article (or multiple articles) that have the essentially the same content but they are perceived by the search engines as somewhat unique. The general consensus is that if you are spinning your articles, that they should be at least 30% unique when compared to the original article.

Why is Article Uniqueness Important?

Google has made it clear that unique and quality content is what it favors. After the Google Panda update last year, “content farms” or those websites perceived to be primarily publishing content that is already all over the web were downgraded in their website rankings in a big way.

The fact is, Google does not index content that is exactly the same in the same way that they do completely original and unique content. Content that is considered “duplicate” is added to their supplemental index, instead of the normal listings. This is a bad thing for Internet marketers because (1) the duplicate articles do not get the same exposure as original articles do, so they do not generate the same amount of traffic, and (2) the links that are found on content found in the supplemental index do not get counted the same way they do in the normal index, rendering them ineffective for SEO purposes.

Is Spinning an Important Part of Successful SEO?

First, SEO has two components: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO is about optimizing the content on your pages by the way that its formatted. Off-page SEO is about building backlinks to your website, which is one aspect of what article marketing can do. So the answer is no, article spinning is not necessarily an important part of successful SEO unless article marketing and distribution are an integral part of your SEO campaign. If you plan on creating one article and then submitting it to various websites – like article directories & blog networks – then I would definitely  suggest spinning your content before submitting it.

My Final Recommendations

My recommendation is to include article marketing in your SEO campaigns, but to carry it out in a very focused way. By that I mean, I do not recommend spinning your content and blasting it to thousands of article directories – I personally think that’s a waste of time. Instead, I suggest spinning above the 30% uniqueness standard recommendation and even spinning at a sentence and paragraph level, rather than just the word level (i.e. synonyms). The Best Spinner is the best spinning software I’ve found and can personally recommend based on the features and quality controls it offers.

Once you’ve spun your articles to a very high level of uniqueness, you can submit them to a select few high quality article directories or blog networks. You can also syndicate small excerpts of your articles to a few focused sources, which is what Auto Traffic Buddy does (and which I found to be very effective, by the way).  I also recommend repurposing your content, which means turning your article into a video, a slideshow presentation, an ebook, etc. I touched on my recommendations in a post I made about article marketing last year. Here’s the cliff notes version:

• Focus on creating good, quality content.
• Distribute your content in a more focused manner.
• Re-purpose your articles to make the most of them.
• Get others to share you content on the various Social Media websites.

So there’s my answer, Melissa. I hope you and my other readers found the information useful. Is article marketing a part of your SEO campaign? Do you spin your articles? What do you use to spin them? Leave me a comment below!

To Your Success and Prosperity,

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