Is There A Price To Be Paid For Article Spinning?

[austtr]

A colleague has a few sites that he has not been able to revive since being hit by Penguin. He has tried everything and nothing works… sound familiar?

We started talking about the possibility that perhaps at some time in the past, the sites might have tripped a “black hat” indicator, and if the action was unintentional, or due to topic ignorance, or has been overtaken by more recent influences, then the poor old webmaster is probably still unaware that there is an underlying problem that no amount of remakes and tinkering will fix.

This led us to the subject of article spinning and it turns out that about 6 years ago, when link volume was everything, several key money pages of these sites were indeed “spun” using a technique promoted by “leading” SEO company.

Although these sites have been withdrawn from the “spinner” company, and the account closed some time ago, there are still blogs out there that carry the spun content with the embedded links. Those links, when detected, are now in a disavowal file.

There is no doubt that links gained by spinning articles are really artificial and it would be easy to imagine they would be high on Google’s hit list. But would Google permanently derank sites for any such indiscretion?

Does anyone have any definitive or anecdotal evidence of sites being made to pay a heavy price for article spinning?

[tangor]

it will be informative, accurate, and rank right up there with the best of the cat disease websites.

It is, after all, content that attracts. :)

(Won't say content is king as that phrase has fallen out of favor)

[austtr]

but the person who's created the definitive guide to the churches of Rome, cat diseases, vintage motorcycles, or Scottish history probably doesn't.

You might be right for esoteric topics with minimal or low competition, but the person who's created the definitive guide to the premier hotels in Paris will be playing 27th fiddle to Google Hotels, sites in the Expedia stable, Tripadvisor and other similar sites.... not one of which "created the definitive guide".... its all cookie cutter formula pages. IMO domain authority usurped content a long time ago and continues to do so.

But my OP asked if spinning incurred the wrath of Google... let me expand the question. If we assume sites that acquired some links by spinning have been smacked, can those sites recover by a thorough cleanup and going through the Penguin recovery process? I'd like to think they can but I'm not seeing any signs of it and am concerned that a spinning offense is terminal.

[tangor]

That begs the question whether a SPUN article has value or not.

I would say ... probably NOT.

I suspect most folks, like me, can tell the difference and scat out of there nimby quick and g, with all that big iron and mystical algo, can probably see the same.

[NickMNS]

@austtr I agree with you on domain authority. I feel that my site is living proof, I have high quality original content that I continue to improve on an ongoing basis, and I am nowhere as compared to my competitors that threw together a crappy site ten years ago, that hasn't been updated it since. Mind you mine traffic is increasing, and there may well be decreasing. But double of a small number is still a small number, and half a large number is still way more traffic than I see.

As to your expanded questions, on the previous page of this thread I linked to a Google webmaster central hangout from two weeks ago I think, where John Muller basically suggested that a site that had been hit by Penguin that wasn't recovering, may want to consider starting over minus the Penguin mistakes. So it looks like the offense may be terminal.

[Walt Hartwell]

Fastest way to get out of Penguin (that I've read, I've never done it) is to put any valuable pages in a subdomain of the original domain and get any valuable links from outside domains to change their link(s) to the new location. Disavow the bad links and 404 the old (previously valuable) pages. Then get more quality links to the pages on the new subdomain.

If all sites were using links from spun content and the sites were interlinked, I'd probably take one site, isolate it from all other commonly owned domains and use the above approach. Then watch it for a month. Determine a longer term plan after evaluating results from one.

[claus]

> Nojo, a word I just coined

Thanks, I love it!

> I don't believe anyone would currently have SEO success with methods that were commonly used in 2006

Time to re-evaluate your belief system, then:

> I have helped sites recover from Nojo by building more Mojo. Works every time.

...and it did in 2006 too. And it will still work in 2026.

[claus]

..as for OT, spun articles are essentially dupe "content". Nothing new about that. It has a price. It always had.

[Robert Charlton]

as for OT, spun articles are essentially dupe "content"

claus... perhaps on a purely mechanical level spun articles can be called "dupe content" ... but don't you think that Google also factors intent into this, just as they used to? This isn't just accidental duplication. To stretch an analogy, this could be seen as a type of counterfeiting.

Google is very big on intent, and the cynicism behind spun content, particularly badly spun content detected by manual review, would, IMO, add considerably to the gravity of the offense.

All that said, I do agree with observations here that Google has expressed the desire to see good use made of good domains. It's not wanting to create derelicts littering the web... so a large turnaround in a site, useful content with, say, "more mojo", capable of attracting better natural links... along with succinct and relevant reconsideration requests... might constitute the kind of concrete action that Google pays attention to. On the other hand, Google is not wanting to waste time with repeat offenders, and I think content spinning is likely to be a special classification.

I know that Google will want to see evidence of concrete change in content and in tactics, something which will take time. If some of those spun articles get taken down, along with the links from them, that would be helpful. Google won't forget, but they might give the reformed domain a trial pass.

I'll leave the link building tactics for others to discuss... except to say that I believe that Google watches new links to old spammers carefully.