What Is Article Spinning?
Article spinning is the practice of taking existing content and running it through automated tools that swap out words and phrases for synonyms, producing a “new” version of the same article without genuinely rewriting it.
Why It’s Considered Black Hat SEO
Spun content was originally used to publish the same article across dozens of low-quality sites to build backlinks, or to disguise plagiarism as original content. The output is almost always awkward, sometimes nonsensical, and offers no real value to readers — which is exactly what Google’s quality algorithms (going back to Panda) were built to catch and penalize.
The Risks of Using It
Beyond the obvious readability problems, spun content risks manual actions and algorithmic demotions for thin or low-quality content, plagiarism disputes if the “spinning” doesn’t sufficiently disguise the original source, and reputational damage if readers spot the garbled, robotic phrasing spinning tools tend to produce.
