Why article submission and spinner software are junk

We’ve had a chance over the last few years to try out a lot of different marketing schemes and tricks to get higher Google rankings, including auto submitters. One of the ways to get your site listed higher in the major search engines is to create a number of external links that point back to your landing page. In it’s day, mass article submitters worked great, but nowadays it seems they are just a waste.

The problem is that the major search engines have caught on to the trick of mindlessly submitting your article to hundreds of link and article submission sites. What they look for now is that each article be different. If not, the submission is not only discarded, but can count against your overall page ranking. Thus was born the companion piece to mass article submitters, the article spinner.

The concept behind this software is that it takes your base article and looks for synonyms to words that are in it’s database. That way every time the article is spun, it is worded differently than the original and will thus count as a positive back link to your landing page. The problem is that these ‘newly worded’ articles can make you sound like a dumb-ass. While you may be able to sneak your new article into a directory and have it count for Google, the result may be that the reader will be so turned off by your abysmal writing that they will look for a more ‘credible’ source. And once you lose your credibility, they won’t follow you again.

The other problem is stop words. Stop words are extremely common words that search engines ignore when indexing pages, calculating relevancy and when interpreting a search query prior to pulling pages from their indices. By simply switching stop words for example ‘this’ to ‘those’ will make no difference to the way a search engine views a page.

This is obviously a very simple example but when you consider that on average 40% of the words in any document are stop words it illustrates that Google will only consider approximately 60% of any document when calculating how unique it is is. Also consider that in order to create documents that are readable, even those created by article spinning, this percentage of stop words has to be maintained.

Article spinning cannot address this problem and in-fact may make things worse. Article spinning is a weak attempt to game search engine algorithms and as such should be used with care if used at all.