Article Spinning
Article spinning is a rather broad term that is primarily used to describe a Search Engine Optimization process wherein an existing content article or parts of many existing articles are modified by any number of differing methods with the end goal being to produce a new (or somewhat new) piece of content that is different enough than the original source(s) that it is able to get through the duplicate content filters that are used by the major search engines.
Article spinning can be accomplished in various ways. Most simply, an article can simply be 'manually' spun. 'Manually' spinning an article is basically just the taking of an existing article and then rewriting it in different words, and perhaps altering the perspective somewhat or modifying the meaning a bit. However, if an article is totally rewritten in completely different words and does not contain any portion of the original article's content then in essence it is now a different article altogether and will be seen by the search engines as original content. If article spinning is being considered as a potential SEO method, then manually spinning an article and completely rewriting the entire content would be the only acceptable way of doing it.
There are however other 'semi-automatic' ways of spinning articles that can be accomplished by utilizing special software. Article spinning software works like this: First, the user will load the original article that he intends upon spinning into the program. Second, usually starting at the beginning of the article and then working his way through the entire article, the user will choose a word and then select that particular word by some means, at which point the software will produce a list of similar words drawn from a thesaurus of synonyms it has stored in its database. The user can now select as many words from the list that he feels are close enough in meaning to the original word that no matter which word is later randomly chosen by the program to replace the original word, the result will still be a meaningful and understandable sentence. Most article spinners will come up with at least a couple of substitutions for nearly every word in the entire composition.
After the entire article has been 'spun', the software will then, in many cases, automatically submit the article(s) to multiple articles directories using a slightly different version of the article each time. These 'different' articles are automatically generated by the software as it randomly substitutes the synonyms that were selected by the user previously to produce many, many variations on the original content. An article that has been 'spun' in this fashion is said to be in 'spintax' format. The advantage to creating so many different versions of the same content (although, in theory, content not seen as duplicate) is the expectation that if every version of the article were to be published and if the search engines truly did see each of these articles as genuinely unique content then a great deal of new backlinks could be generated in a very short amount of time. Most article directories allow two backlinks in the resource box of every article published, so if there 20 different versions of an article created and published that is potentially 40 backlinks generated very quickly.
Considering the amount of time and effort put into spinning articles and trying to game the system, it would seem that coming up with truly original content would take no more effort or time and would be so much more effective in creating the intended result. Using original content will not only be beneficial for SEO purposes but in addition, having creative, well written, original content will actually be read and appreciated by real guests and will produce some loyal followers.