Article Spinning: Google Fights Back
Google have openly declared war on content farms and paraphrased content produced by Article Spinning. Matt Cutts often referred to as Google’s spam Tsar has been quoted as saying:
“You definitely want to write algorithms that will find the signals of good sites. You know, the sorts of things like original content rather than just scraping someone, or rephrasing what someone else has said. And if you can find enough of those signals—and there are definitely a lot of them out there—then you can say, OK, find the people who break the story, or who produce the original content, or who produce the impact on the Web, and try to rank those a little higher. . . .”
There is no better description of article spinning than “rephrasing what someone else has said”. It has to be said the writing has been on the wall for some time. Quality continues to play an increasingly important role in Google algorithms and while it’s always been beneficial to be relevant, signals of quality seem to be taking over the mantle of importance that PageRank once held. The days of plagiarizing someone’s content and attempting to cover your trail by spinning it are definitely numbered.
A good balance of relevance and quality will certainly make searching more productive and less frustrating. Demoting low quality near duplicate content and the unreadable garbage that article spinning often generate might mean problems to SEO’s and marketers who have used this technique in the past. As pages are devalued or dropped from the index the links the contained will disappear. There is no great loss where those links point to scrapper sites and spam blogs, and many do because article spinning has become a favorite technique of black hat SEO’s and spammers alike.
But what of those that fell for the hype that surrounds article spinning and started syndicating spun documents as a means to drive more traffic and raise search engine positions. Professional spammers knew the consequences of their actions and use throwaway domains to protect themselves and move on quickly when things go wrong. However, legitimate businesses may find themselves with a steep hill to climb in both regaining trust from search engines and regaining the search engine visibility they might have enjoyed for some time.
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