Content Spinners: Are they good for your affiliate business?
Posted by Administrator (admin) on Sunday, 20th April, 2008 at 8:31 AM
Affiliate Business Basics >>

Fundamentally, content spinning is taking a written work, usually a Private Label Rights article, and rewriting it so that it appears unique. Many times such articles are re-written numerous times so that they can be re-used over and over again. The main objective is to make each article appear to be unique to the search engines - that is – they are rewritten so as to avoid the appearance of duplicate content.

Software has become available over the last couple of years that assist in rewriting – or spinning - articles by utilizing word and phrase replacement with a thesaurus database. Usually, the user can add their own phrases or sentences as well. The user selects the words and phrases to be changed, provides substitutes and when the article is fed to the software, the original article is changed by replacing those selected words and phrases with the chosen substitutes. This is all done automatically and is termed “spinning an article”.

There are a variety of vendors seeking a market share in this business, and the sales of such programs is brisk. As would be expected, the quality of such programs vary. Most are able to utilize both word and phrase replacement, but other more exotic offerings such as Website Content Wizard are able to do much greater variety of spinning, including nesting of entire blocks of sentences so that uniqueness is virtually guaranteed. It is important to keep in mind that the level of work varies directly in proportion to the quality expected out of any of these software offerings. Although the developers of content spinners may allure you with how easy it is to output hundreds of articles, this writer can attest to the fact that this is not the case. Having tested several article spinners myself, I can speak with confidence that none of them can be used without putting the work in. The time you invest in spinning is directly proportional to the quality. In fact, unless you are spinning an article at least 5 – 10 times, it probably isn't worth the purchase. Its simply easier to rewrite the articles yourself, if you need only a few.

Now its important that we go back to the reason for spinning articles in the first place. Recall that people are doing this so that the content on their web sites appear unique. And this is in fact what content spinners were designed to do. If the time is put in on preliminary work such as phrase building, then the articles can be alright - they are “readable”. However it is very difficult to establish your own “tone”. Oftentimes I can visit a website and I can tell immediately if the content is spun, simply because there is something missing. Its hard for computers to put the human element in the article.

By its very nature, content spinning is Search Engine Optimization. SEO is, itself – artificial. That is to say, it isn't a good reflection of what people really want, and people want quality information. SEO seeks to manipulate the results so that the result is acceptable to the search engines. However, the Search engines – and especially Google, are looking for what people want. People aren't looking to be “sold”, at least not at first. They are looking for good, reliable, valuable information. In my opinion, content spinning rarely – if ever - delivers this kind of quality.

I realize that people are making money utilizing these tools, but in the long run they won't give you the longevity that will put you ahead of the pack – and keep you there. There is simply no substitute for the human element of personality that can be woven throughout a website. If you care to test this principle, try to think back about the sites that you respect the most. I'd bet money they are not developed using content spinners.

In conclusion, its probably safe to say that there are reasons for using content spinners, but if you are looking for your sites to go the distance, you'll need to make certain that you're preparing for the future. Do a little spinning, but don't abandon good quality material in a niche you enjoy. These are the on-line businesses that will be around this year, and in the year 2010.