Google SEO content
At this point, just about everybody has heard of "black hat SEO." If you're bothering to read this, you've heard of it. We ourselves mentioned it a few days ago when discussing the fallout from Penguin 3.0's recent release. But what is black hat SEO, beyond the vague understanding that it's stuff you do on your website that upsets Google and makes them bury your search rankings in a shallow grave in the desert?
Black hat SEO doesn't seem so bad, until you actually understand what it is. Then it becomes obvious why it's bad SEO.
When you see something on TV about how cheap hot dogs or chicken nuggets are made (mmm... pink slime), it doesn't exactly make you hungry, does it? Ignorance is bliss. Black hat SEO is much the same way in a number of respects. Getting a behind the scenes look at the whats and hows of black hat practices makes it apparent why they're considered problematic, and why Google has taken such a merciless stance with websites that use them.
There are many different flavors of black hat SEO practices, so many that a lot of them can't be explained in a brief overview. Instead, let's talk about a single type that gets relatively little time in the spotlight, despite having been an integral part of unsavory SEO practices for a number of years: "content spinning, " sometimes known as "article spinning."
Low-rent SEO marketers advertise that they can get your business relevant backlinks in hundreds or thousands of related blog posts and pages. That's great, but the trick is, they've got to be able to generate all of that content quickly in order for it to be worth their while. They can't just write one blog post and throw it up on a thousand different pseudo-blogs and low-grade article collection sites. Google would quickly recognize what was going on, and punish all the sites sharing that duplicate content. And your site would be punished as well for being linked to by all of those copy-paste articles.
So, how can our cheap SEO guy cook up a whole bunch of articles that are different from one another? This is where content spinning comes into play.
Content spinning is simply taking something that is written one way, and rewriting it so that it sounds different.
People spin content all the time when they write. It's what students are taught to do in English class in order to avoid plagiarizing research sources. Say that little Johnny is writing an essay on Shakespeare, and he wants to include a detail about Shakespeare that he found in a book: "Shakespeare created thousands of new words which are still used in the English language today." If Johnny just lifts that sentence straight from the book and puts it in his essay, he's gonna get an F from his teacher if he gets caught. Dang it, Copyscape.
So at the bare minimum, what Johnny needs to do is communicate that idea without using the exact same sentence. That's easy. There are almost an infinite number of ways to do it, just by playing around with word choice, or the structure of the sentence. Some examples:
Thousands of words that Shakespeare invented still exist in the English language.
Shakespeare contributed to the English language by creating thousands of new words.
Thousands of the words in the English language were coined by Shakespeare.
The English language owes the creation of thousands of words to Shakespeare.
You get the idea. Every one of those sentences, and hundreds of other possibilities, are different from one another while still communicating the same general information: A whole bunch of English words were made up by Shakespeare.
