Content Spinning

Content spinning is a black hat technique that involves automatically rewriting a source text to produce dozens or even hundreds of unique versions of the same article. The text is encoded in a curly-brace format called spintax (e.g., {word1|word2|word3}) where each alternative is separated by a pipe character. Spinning software then randomly selects among variants to generate apparently different articles. This technique was massively used to populate private blog networks (PBNs), web 2.0 platforms, and directories with pseudo-unique content to obtain backlinks. Google's algorithms, particularly Panda and the Helpful Content updates, now effectively detect spun content by analyzing semantic coherence, readability, and repetitive patterns. Sites using spun content face page devaluation or manual penalties. Ethical alternatives include creating original content, editorial curation, and using generative AI with human review.