Search engine spam is defined as the action of “polluting” the search engine listings with highly irrelevant results. No, I’m not talking about a search for “Giants” that points to the American football team rather than Goliath, this is a relevant result and you need to fine-tune your query to get the proper result. A spam site is made solely for search engines, with little to no added value for the human visitor.

As spammers’ techniques have evolved, so have the search engines algorithms. The first spam sites date back to around ten years ago when you could rank very high with a site bloated with ads and unrelated repeating phrases. As Google caught up with spammers more and more shady practices have become mainstream. A popular technique used by gray-hat marketers nowadays involves tools that grab a piece of content and “spin” it into hundreds of fairly unique articles by replacing each word with its synonyms. Each of these are then submitted to article directories, yielding hundreds of backlinks with little work.

Content that looks like it has been written by a monkey with a typewriter will probably get de-indexed in the near future, as Google recently announced on their blog. Such results may be shown if and only if the user has typed in a really long keyword and there are no other competitive results. Such articles are either created by a software program or by an illiterate (human) writer – either way they don’t bring any added value to a visitor who is looking for genuine information.

These tools, also known as “content spinners”, are a surefire way of raising some warning flags. Google is sure to ban you once the per-page “bogus” content ratio is above a certain threshold. Let’s have a look at what you might get when spinning a simple phrase like

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

A quick search for synonyms on a site like thesaurus.com gets us:

• quick: ASAP, a move on, accelerated, double time, move it, on the double, swift, agile, fast, speedy
• brown: dark, chestnut, coffee, dust, hazel, snuff-colored, toast
• fox: coyote, cur, dingo, pooch (this is the closest context, most of the results thesaurus.com gives are in the range of angel/babe/peach/attractive woman or bluff/cheat/con/deceive)
• jumps: leap, bob, canter, leaping, nosedive, upsurge, leapfrogging, hop (note how all verbs are in infinitive rather than present simple tense,  so your software will also have to take care of tenses)
• lazy: apathetic, asleep on the job, lifeless, procrastinating, idle
• dog: bitch (!), mongrel, bowwow, flea bag

You guessed it,  the results are going to be ridiculous:

The ASAP coffee dingo leapfrogging over the asleep on the job mongrel.

The double time dark coyote leap over the idle flea bag.

Content spinning is not the right choice of doing article marketing. The benefits over the short run won’t matter anymore when Google catches up with your practices and de-indexes all your pages.