Man, you leave your blog unattended for one second… Okay, it was more like a few weeks, but still, as soon as a lull appeared in my weekly updates (for the first time in several years) the sleaze crept in.

“Hi. I see that you don’t update your site too often. I know that writing posts is boring and time consuming. But did you know that there is a tool that allows you to create new articles using existing content (from article directories or other pages from your niche)? And it does it very well. The new articles are unique and pass the copyscape test. You should try miftolo’s tools”

Now my first reaction was, “Dude, did you miss the big notices saying we were on vacation?” Then I realized the username this was posted under was “ClintJuicy” and then I re-read what was being said and… Gah. This is ad spam. What’s worse, this is ad spam for something I was blissfully ignorant of until now, which is the practice of article spinning. Put simply, article spinning is generating “new” content by regurgitating previous articles on your site with just enough words changed so that the indexing agents of search engines like Google are fooled into actually considering it new content and thus your search ranking is maintained or whatever the hell the shenanigans and permutations of the SEO (search engine optimization) world get up to. It’s big business, no doubt about it, heck I even had a friend who worked for one of these SEO companies for awhile… at least until the manager was led out in handcuffs by the police (true story!). Me? Hell, I might occasionally regurgitate content but it’ll either be out of genuine poor memory or because I feel like I have a genuinely new take on the subject. Changing a few words around and calling that new? Feh. Automating the process? Double feh. If it ever came down to that, I’d rather just post nothing at all.