Two things have struck me in recent days while I’ve been researching on the internet. First, the number of different blogs that have on them exactly the same article. And, regrettably, few if any of them have carried the author’s bio box, thereby robbing the author of a link to his or her web site or blog.
The second thing is how badly written most of the blog entries are. In fact I’ve come to realise that many of them are not actually written at all. They’re “spun” by a software program, which takes an article written by a human being and “spins” it so as to appear different to the search engines and article directories, even though it is essentially the same article as the original. It just appears at first glance to be different.
What’s the purpose of this? Well, it enables the original writer of the article to post it, not just once with just one link to his site or blog, but many times, with multiple links to his site or blog, therefore giving it a “boost” in its search engine ranking with a resultant increase in visitors and paying customers.
All article spinners do is take the original article and substitute various words in it for other words with the same meaning, so as to make it a “different” article. But really nothing has changed. No new information or viewpoint has been added. Nobody will gain any additional knowledge or information by reading it. Multiply this by many times – some article spinners boast of being able to “spin” an article by as many as 50 times – and we can see how the internet is being clogged up with drivel.
Take this as an example. I found this recently when researching an alternative health topic.
“To minimize the attack of hay fever, work out a check on what assortment of plants provide off their pollen in the year and while they are flying active during the season within your field of the world, try avoid being outdoors as much as viable. Honey contains pollen as well so maintain away from them.
Hay fever could be treated at home as fine. Prepare 8 oz warm salt water using 2 tablespoons of table salt and gargle it to decrease sore throat.
There are some kinds of medicines obtainable in the pharmacy or supermarkets and always follow a information on a actuality leaflet.”
Can you make sense of this? No, I couldn’t either. In fact it was a pain reading it. The trouble is that software can automatically change certain words but can’t judge whether the resulting sentence makes any sense.
For example the first “the” should be “an”, the word “assortment” was probably “kind” originally, the word “provide” was probably “give”, and “field” was probably “part”. The word “fine” in the first sentence of the second paragraph was “well” in the original article, and so on. As you can see, there are plenty more examples in this short extract.
So an article that made sense as originally written has been turned into gobbledegook by an article spinner, and the person who wrote the original article (or, more likely, stole the original article) has been too lazy to go through the output and make any corrections.
All this is a great pity because it devalues the internet as a source of information.
This is a call for everyone to shun article spinners. They add no value to any article or to the internet as a whole and in the long run they won’t enrich anyone who uses them. They’re a fraud.
Agreed? Let’s hear the views of everyone else out there.
Philip Gegan
