Article Spin Fail
Have you ever found yourself reading an article and realized that a word or two just seemed insanely out of place? And that if another more obvious word were substituted, the sentence would make perfect sense? Why didn’t the author use the correct wording? You may have been the victim of an article spin fail:
a SEO tactic whereby numerous unique versions of an original article are automatically generated by searching and replacing keywords and phrases, but that does not make sense to the human eye.
If you’re like me, you probably don’t read as much as you’d like. Call me prejudiced, but when I read, I like to read works that are written by humans. I won’t call out the source, but I stumbled the above phrase while strolling through a neighbor’s content farm. Do you think the above was written by a human? Someone or something totally missed the point.
Notice the first sentence in the bullet point. Note the capitalization. How should the sentence have read?
March 24th, 2011
You get the same kind of results from those free translation tools. They make a great “quickie” read to get an overview of what something is in a language might be slow in, but don’t use the text without first re-writing it.
April 5th, 2011
Thanks for the great laugh Emory! :) I’m sure when you talk about Sex and the City reruns you don’t want to call Sex (capital) not intercourse. Sorry that one sticks out like a sore thumb.
April 21st, 2011
Haha, the height of laziness! Didn’t even proof read to check if made the remotest bit of sense. Fail.
May 16th, 2011
Lol. That’s a product of a poor article spinner software and of course, laziness. Consider the effect that badly spun articles could have on the reader and their perception of your company or the products you are trying to promote
June 8th, 2011
Man, that’s funny. I keep meeting people who want to use article spin software… little do they realize it will probably only hurt the reputation (and ranking) of their businesses in the long-run.
July 18th, 2011
This post reminds me that I wanted to ask you about content farms. Are they doing as well as they used to?
I don’t mean the splog type stuff above, though that’s on my mind. I’m thinking ehow and the rest, actually.
July 18th, 2011
I haven’t heard anyone say they’ve fully recovered from the content farm aka Panda changes. I have one site that lost about half its traffic; I made some changes, then it started getting record traffic but for keywords that I didn’t care about and wasn’t trying to rank for. Seems like a tough hole to get out of.
July 27th, 2011
I frequent a well known IM forum (not DP), and am totally amazed by how many people use these types of tactics and then come and ask for assistance finding out why their sites are not performing very well. They just don’t seem to grasp the fact that unique, quality material is what makes you stand out in the crowd, and not reworded trash that just pollutes the Internet, making them an authority in nothing. Then again, most of these farmers care little but for the few cents they get from their adsense ads being clicked. Most often clicked by accident since no one can quite figure out what are ads and what is content. Personally, I’m glad to see Google doing something about this, though there has been some innocent sites that have gotten knocked out of the game as a result.
December 20th, 2011
Hello,
~ a year ago, I have made some tests with my own article spinners(I made a wordpress plugin for that), they were realy simple, and google never penalized the sites, and they got more and more traffic daily, I just did a test, I didn’t like article spinners, I have when somebody “steals” my content, and hate that they will don’t have penalty for that…
Thanks