RichQuickReview » spinning

Duplicate Content – Penalty or Not?

Shane — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:55:42 +0000

The feared “duplicate content penalty” is a subject that keeps popping up whenever people are discussing SEO, link building and particularly article marketing. I already published a short post on this subject, including a video showing a Google representative stating, in no uncertain terms, that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. In this post, I want to take a different angle and offer a possible explanation for why the myth about the dcp is such a pervasive one.

Omission From Search Listings

There is something that frequently happens in Google search results, that perhaps could be misinterpreted as some sort of penalty. As an example, I just did a quick search on Google for the name of this blog and “Best Spinner”. The reason I did this is because I know that I have referenced to the program called The Best Spinner in several posts already, so there’s bound to be a whole bunch of listings – some of them from posts, at least one of them on the homepage (at the time of this writing) and so on.

Here is what Google returned:

As you can see, there’s a double listing of results on this domain. After that, however, results from other places around the web are displayed. As I’ve marked with the arrow, there’s a “Show more results from richquickreview.com” option. Let’s see what happens when I click it:

Now, I get seven listings and there’s a new option at the bottom for showing all of the listings on richquickreview, for this search term.

Oh no! All of my Best Spinner posts, save for two, have been penalized by Google and they aren’t showing up in the search results! Time to PANIC!

Of course, what’s going on here is not a penalty of any kind. Google generally don’t show more than two results for one and the same domain. And they generally don’t show more than two results from different domains, if the content is identical.

If you write an article and submit it to a dozen different article directories, unchanged, you’ll get a similar result when you do a search for it: The results will typically list your article on one or two directories, followed by the option to show more of the results that are hidden, because they are identical.

The important point here is that this is not a penalty. The omitted pages are all indexed by Google, they are all flowing pagerank and no one is getting their sites “sandboxed” because of duplicate content.

Obviously, the pages won’t all get listed in the results, because who would want to find several pages of the same article as a result for a search query?

Chasing (Long) Tail

This is where article spinning comes in. The point of spinning articles is not to “avoid the duplicate content penalty” as way too many sales-pitches for spinning tools would have you believe, the point is to grab more long-tail traffic. If you write an article, spin it’s content and then distribute it to a few dozen or even a few hundred online properties, it’s a bit like casting a wide net out into unknown waters: You don’t know where the fish are, but by pure chance you’re bound to catch a few.

All of your spun articles will consist of different sequences of words and every time someone “out there” on the Internet happens to search for a string of words that are present in one of your article variations, it’s likely that that variation will show up in the search results. And thus, you catch another fish.

I hope this clarifies the whole dupe-content subject a bit. If you have any further questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Cheers,

The Best Spinner – Video Review

Shane — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:27:50 +0000

A few days ago, I published my written review of The Best Spinner. As usual, I like to follow up with a video-review, since my written reviews tend to go into a lot of detail and are quite extensive. So, if you’re looking for a quick demonstration of the Best Spinner article spinning software as well as my thoughts about it, check out the video below.

As always, comments and questions are very welcome!

(According to the FTC, I need to state that the above banner contains an affiliate link… because I’m sure all the Internet marketers reading this couldn’t have figured that out themselves.)

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The Best Spinner Review

Shane — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 05:54:04 +0000

I’ve already produced a fair amount of content concerning article spinning and I’ve often said that (spinning-) bots are stupid and that I’m no fan of auto-rewritten content. In light of this, it’s only fair that I give the big new player in the article spinning scene a fair review.

Can the Best Spinner live up to it’s name or is it another piece of junkware you should steer clear of? Read on to find out.

Overview

Name:	TheBestSpinner
Creator:	Jonathan Leger
Medium:	Article Spinning Software
Price:	$77 / Year

The Best Spinner is yet another article spinning tool. It’s certainly not the only one of it’s kind, but it does have some interesting features that make it stand out of the crowd. Let’s go right ahead and look at it’s main, unique selling point:

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User Generated Database

When you load a text into the Best Spinner, you can select individual words and get a list of suggestions for synonyms you can replace these words with. Creating the spinning syntax is just a matter of clicking on all the synonyms you want to include.

Other article spinning programs have had similar features and it usually spells disaster for the readability of the spun texts. Just replacing individual words with synonyms is a guaranteed method for butchering an article. So, how does the Best Spinner attempt to solve this problem?

First of all, the database of alternatives is human-generated and human-prioritized. For any given word, the best Spinner will suggest words that other Best Spinner users have chosen as replacements in the past. And the more often a word has been chosen by users in the past, the higher up in the list it appears.

Secondly, TBS does not only offer alternatives for individual words, but also for phrases. Again, these alternatives are human-generated. It rarely offers alternatives for phrases of more than two or three words, but still: This is already a great step forward in the realm of semi-automated article spinning.

Finally, TBS is not only about having alternatives inserted automatically (otherwise the database would never grow), it’s also made sure that inserting alternatives for words, phrases or entire paragraphs is as easy and convenient as possible.

Check out this short video to see the system in action:

More Features

Apart from the basic spinning functionality, the Best Spinner has quite a few more tricks up it’s sleeve.

Nested Spinning
TBS fully supports unlimited nested spinning (spinning within spinning). This is a very important feature since nested spinning is perhaps the best way to increase uniqueness of an article while keeping it readable.
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Replace All
For any word or phrase you are re-writing, you can tell TBS to apply the same variations to all the occurrences of that same word or phrase throughout the entire text.
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Favourites
You can save variations for particular words as your favourites and have them replaced in new texts at the click of a button.
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Different Spin Syntax Formats
TBS supports three different spin code styles that you can export your texts to, depending on which distribution software you want to use them with.
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Auto Spin
TBS features something of an auto-spinning option by allowing you to have all available words replaced with the favourite variations from everyone in the database. This makes sure that only the most relevant and frequently used synonyms are chosen.
The results produced by this are remarkably readable for auto-spun content, but they’re still not something I’d want to put my name on.
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Post to Blog
You can have your text posted to as many WordPress blogs (of your own) as you like. This way, you can make use of something like your own little article network.

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Ratings

Spam Factor

I have yet to receive a promotional e-mail.

Scam-Scale

No upsells, no catches or disappointments inside. The product does what it says on the box and then some.

Overall Rating

There’s no doubt: The Best Spinner lives up to it’s name. It’s simply the best article spinning tool I’ve ever come across. It’s very easy to use and it makes article spinning a hundred times more convenient and faster than if you were doing it manually.
That doesn’t mean it’s a magical money-maker, however. Article spinning isn’t something that will make you rich over night. It’s simply something that can be put to good use for SEO purposes and that can be a good component in your overall marketing strategy.

But this is one of the things I really like about the Best Spinner: It doesn’t claim to be a miracle cure for everything. It claims to be an awesome article spinning tool and it delivers.

It’s so straight-forward, that the next part here might seem overly simplistic:

This is for you, if:

You are doing any kind of article spinning as part of your marketing.

This is not for you, if:

Article spinning is not part of your strategy.

Definitely give TBS a try, especially since right now, a trial for only $7 is available. Click the banner below to give it a go.

(Yes, that’s an affiliate link, so I make some money if you decide to join through my link. Shocking, isn’t it?)

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CRewriter – Free Article Spinning Application

Shane — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:10:07 +0000

While I’m generally not a big fan of article spinning, I still make use of the technique here and there and I’m still going to be testing article marketing and rewriting software. Enter the CRewriter. This is an online application that you can use to make the article spinning process a bit simpler. Best of all, this tool is completely free to use.

Below, you’ll find a video showing the CRewriter in action and some more details about what it does and where you can find it.

Video

Check out this video to see how to use the CRewriter:

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Summary/Conclusion

The CRewriter is a very neat tool that basically inserts the spinning syntax (curly brackets and pipes) for you. You still have to do the actual rewriting yourself and that’s a good thing, because it means no one is going to create horribly unreadable garbage like most automatic spinners produce.

Most importantly, CRewriter lets you enter alternatives for entire sentences or any amount of text you like and it supports nested spinning. If you are serious about rewriting complete articles, you’ll get the best results by starting out with spinning large sections of text and then spinning sentences and words within those variations. This will result in the best kind of unique articles, if you can keep the overview over what you’ve spun and how the variations come together.

If it could handle larger portions of text without slowing down, this would be a flawless little tool. As it is, it’s still amazing value considering that it’s free to use.

What are your experiences with article spinning? Do you know and/or use tools like the one above or do you know a better one, perhaps? I’d love to hear your take on this!

Cheers,

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Article Spinning Pro Tip: Don’t Do It!

Shane — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:34:25 +0000

A while back, I made a video series about article spinning. A few forum-discussions on the topic as well as the fact that I have been on the receiving end of some spun articles lately, inspired me to make the video you can find below. If you saw my three tips on how to make use of spinning syntax, you already know that I never spin the entire article content. This is also explained a bit further in this video:

As mentioned in the video, I’d love to hear what your take on this whole content spinning thing is and if your experience has been different from mine, I’d be very interested to know in learning more about it.

Cheers,

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Concept Testing Market Research

Article Spinning Video (2/3): How to Use Article Spinning Syntax

Shane — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:13:18 +0000

In this video, I explain the use of article spinning syntax (a.k.a. Spyntax) to set up your texts for automatic spinning. Spyntax uses curly brackets and pipes in the text. These things here: { } and |. Article spinning tools can recognize this syntax and use it to automatically and randomly generate variations of your text. Sounds more complicated than it is. Watch the video and all will become clear:

The two free article spinning software tools mentioned in the video can be found here:

Jetspinner

Article Submission Helper

Both are completely free. The Article Submission Helper (ASH) also includes an automatic article submission module. It’s definitely worth giving a try.

Don’t miss my final video where I put everything together and show you exactly what kind of spinning makes sense and what kind is just a waste of time.

Cheers,

EDIT: There was an editing mistake in the video. I reuploaded it and changed the link above. My apologies to everyone who saw the video with the error.

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Article Spinning Video (1/3): What Is Article Spinning?

Shane — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:21:51 +0000

In this video, I explain the basic idea behind article spinning. You’ll see how spinning existing content into new and (semi-)unique versions can be useful, but you’ll also see what you should avoid doing. If it is not done right, article spinning is just a huge waste of time.

Check out the first out of this series of three videos about article spinning:

I hope you enjoyed this. Watch out for my next two videos to learn more about the dos and don’ts of spinning content.

Cheers,