Article Spinning and Auto Blogging

[Katalina]

Just having a day of it where it seems like everywhere I look I see another blog with posts that have been "spun" or scrapped from some other site. What a bunch of junk!
Why do people believe that these types of blogs are worth anything? Do they really make any money, or just annoy people like me?

Thanks, just had to rant for a little bit.

[TerryGl]

I agree. I use article spinning software myself. I like to think I know how to use it. The problem is the software works and works well but unfortunately it is the operator of the software that destroys any benefit giving spun articles a bad name.

Who would ever believe that changing a word here and there could possibly be any good. The secret is to change everything in the article such as word and sentence counts, paragraphs, titles, anchor text/url's etc.

Most importantly of all is to read the results to make sure it is grammatically correct and worthwhile reading. Until that is done, spin articles will always carry a bad reputation.

______________________________
~Terry~
Article Spinning - Is Not A Waste Of Time

[ChickenFreak]

Originally Posted by TerryGl

Most importantly of all is to read the results to make sure it is grammatically correct and worthwhile reading. Until that is done, spin articles will always carry a bad reputation.

Well, they _should_ have a bad reputation. One good article is one good article. Turning it into multiple not-quite-identical twins, each containing the same information, is pointless, whether they're grammatically correct or not. It's bad for the search engines, it's bad for the readers, it's bad for the web. It's just bad.

[SeanStewards]

most people do that because Green stuff connected with it,honestly I am also one of the people who spin other content and put it on my site,I am sorry for that, I hope I am not taking one of my content from yours

[ChickenFreak]

Originally Posted by SeanStewards

most people do that because Green stuff connected with it,honestly I am also one of the people who spin other content and put it on my site,I am sorry for that, I hope I am not taking one of my content from yours

You do realize that it's considered black hat SEO, right? It's also quite likely a prosecutable copyright violation.

[sub001]

If you think about it, Google Search itself (along with many of its other services) is one large scraper. In fact, the biggest of them all.

As for spinning, it's just a form of rewriting. If you look at a story snippet at Google News you will see under each snippet something like "all 457 news articles". Most of them will be just a rewrite of one another with many coming from reputable news sites.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with rewriting. The problem is, the way most people use it, spinning usually produces very poor copy that diminishes the overall quality of the Web. In other words, it's not the method that is wrong. It's how it's used.

[Gennie32]

some do it for fun, some for enjoyment, some to pass time and some for money.

[ChickenFreak]

Originally Posted by sub001

If you think about it, Google Search itself (along with many of its other services) is one large scraper. In fact, the biggest of them all.

As for spinning, it's just a form of rewriting. If you look at a story snippet at Google News you will see under each snippet something like "all 457 news articles". Most of them will be just a rewrite of one another with many coming from reputable news sites.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with rewriting. The problem is, the way most people use it, spinning usually produces very poor copy that diminishes the overall quality of the Web. In other words, it's not the method that is wrong. It's how it's used.

_Automated_ rewriting for no purpose other than concealing the fact the story is identical to the original is quite different from actually writing something, even if the the person actually writing something is working from the same facts as many other people. Many different takes on the same facts have a strong chance of adding value; a bunch of thesaurus insertions and string shifts adds no value. In fact, it almost certainly subtracts it, since the original writer made the original word choices and choices about the order of presentation for a reason.

If you're arguing that it's useless for exactly the same Reuters (or other syndicated) story to be repeated in a thousand different news outlets, there's some merit to that idea. However, those news outlets have generally made some editorial decisions and arranged the news in a way that's useful to their readers - readers in Chicago and readers in Los Angeles probably have different priorities. So the repetition has some value for someone. And they're using the original decently-written syndicated story, not a badly-assembled cut and paste of it. Syndication of stories has some value; spinning of them does not.

[stephen todd]

Originally Posted by Katalina

Just having a day of it where it seems like everywhere I look I see another blog with posts that have been "spun" or scrapped from some other site. What a bunch of junk!
Why do people believe that these types of blogs are worth anything? Do they really make any money, or just annoy people like me?

Thanks, just had to rant for a little bit.

One of my blog sites that uses solely RSS aggregation and spun articles pulled in via RSS was valued at over 6,000 dollars by esitestats.com

Nine days ago I added a video directory using youtube videos and it's now worth over $10,000 dollars, as I got a big jump in the number of pages indexed by google - now got 3,500 pages indexed by google

I spend about 3 hours a month on the site, and make $60 a month from adsense


Another of my sites has the same as above but also has an article directory - with articles scraped from article directories - and the site is valued at ... wait for it ... over $138,000 and makes over $630 a month from adsense - I spend about 20 hours a month on the site

So yes they do make money - because they create far more content daily than is possible manually

The really rubbish sites you often see are fully-auto - I don't run sites like that as many of the posts would be off-topic and degrade the quality of the site

[ChickenFreak]

Originally Posted by stephen todd

One of my blog sites that uses solely RSS aggregation and spun articles pulled in via RSS was valued at over 6,000 dollars by esitestats.com

Recalling our past discussion about grabbing articles using RSS and whether it's a copyright violation: I consider it highly likely that spinning someone else's articles would indeed be a copyright violation. It's a derivative work without permission.