Article spinning is a common practice in search engine optimization. It is a writing technique that uses one source material or more to create new content. The new article is essentially about the same topic or subject. It also contains the same information as is available in the source material. The content in the source material is rewritten in a manner that the new article is not similar in a literal sense. The key difference between the original or source material and the new article is wording, structure and at times the message.

Spinning an article is often perceived as re-writing. This is not an accurate perception. The spun article does not have to drive home the same point. The main content or the information available in the source material can be used in any manner as required for a specific purpose. Parts of the article may be used along with information from other source materials to convey a specific message. The inference may be the same but there is no hard and fast rule for the new content to be precisely about the conclusion drawn by the original author.

Article spinning was once frowned upon, especially when people used it for spamming and black hat search engine optimization purposes. Today, spun articles are very common and they have also become necessary. Article spinning can be a manual or an automatic process. The earliest tools used to spin articles automatically were poor and the quality of the new contents was unacceptable. Spun articles using such tools were barely readable and some were only a bunch of texts. The words were in disarray and phrases or sentences made little sense. The tools have improved over the years and now automated spinning is quite common. However, most people still rely on manual spinning as it allows a writer to have a distinct voice. This distinction basically segregates the two pieces or more.

Spinning an article can be confined to just a section of an original piece or the whole content. The resulting content may have more information but if the major portion of it is sourced from one piece and the text is literally rewritten with new wording, sentence construction and structure of paragraphs then the whole process is spinning. Given the quantum of content available online, article spinning is a necessity and also an empowering option for content creators, marketers and webmasters along with search engine optimization experts.