What is article spinning used for?
A form of thin content, article spinning is a black hat SEO tactic and something to avoid during an SEO campaign. Spun articles are used on a website's blog or as a method of link building, often using spammy guest blogs. Article spinning is where a webmaster will reword an article to be used on their website or as part of a link building strategy without adding any additional information or value to the original article. Spun content is usually used to avoid potential duplicate content penalties and can be carried out manually or automatically by software.
It is just plagiarism. Just because you have reworded something does not mean that it is unique, so please avoid the temptation of spinning articles as a method of content creation! Many black hat SEOs will use article spinning software as a method of generating large quantities of content. In essence it us just another form of duplicate content. Whilst spun content is still spun content, if you had to grade them, articles that have been created via article spinning software would be right at the bottom of the pile. They are usually completely unreadable, using synonyms that would never be used by a human! Even if they are manually created they still count as plagiarism because they add no further facts, opinions or value compared with the original article. Not unsurprisingly Google does not want their search results to be filled with content that has been plagiarised from originals, especially those that are completely ineligible..
Article spinning is used by spammers in content farms as a method of producing enough content to attempt to fool Google's algorithm into returning said plagiarised articles in search results. In addition, people will spin articles and submit them to numerous blogs in order to gain a backlink. Automatically spun articles (via software) are obviously highly unlikely to pass any sort of human vetting and so this type of content is usually submitted to spammy guest blogs that accept any content as long as it is above a certain word count.
As above, we would never recommend spinning articles as part of your SEO campaign. It may be tempting as a method of saving time researching a subject and creating your own unique and valuable content. However, get caught and you will feel the wrath of Google's webspam team and associated updates. You wouldn't be happy to find other websites plagiarising content that you have worked hard to create. Grey hat or black hat spammers may argue that manually spun articles are actually unique content but this is simply not true. Just because the words have been reshuffled does not mean that the content does not, at its bare bones, say exactly the same thing as the original!