This morning I received an email from Envato Market, which is a very large marketplace for website design templates, plugins, and files. The email subject line was “Rebecca is Your Website Ranking?” which immediately peaked my interest since I do not view Envato as the authority on search engine optimization.
As I began reading the email, Envato is proposing I review and purchase one of “eight handpicked plugins” for SEO. Again my interest continued to peak as I was now very curious as to what they would propose.
One plugin immediately caught my eye and it was titled “WP AutoSpinner – Article Rewriter” which was a red flag for me immediately.
When I visited the Envato website, I read the following in the product description:
WordPress auto spinner rewrites wordpress posts automatically to convert it to fresh new content by replacing words and phrases by it’s synonyms on auto pilot using it’s built in synonyms database or optionally using one of the best spinning services api including:
- SpinRewriter api
- WordAi.com api
- TheBestSpinner.com api
- ChimpRewriter api
- ContentProfessor.com api
- SpinnerChief.com api
- Languages Supported: english flag English Turkish
Works with WordPress Automatic Plugin which can post from various sources to wordpress on complete auto-pilot.
OMG! Don’t Do It! And Let Me Explain Why
This plugin goes directly against the Webmaster Guidelines set forth by Google. It takes an easy way out for SEO and it will lead you down a path of lost ranking and virtually no SEO traffic.
Before you dismiss this as mere Google suggestions, let’s quickly review what Google states in their documentation:
We strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the Quality Guidelines below, which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam action. If a site has been affected by a spam action, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.
In the above, Google states is will entirely remove a website if it violates the quality guidelines. Not only have I witnessed sites being removed, I’ve had SEO prospects show up after being penalized for such behavior. One such client was specifically penalized for content spinning and it took us months to fix the degrading in ranking he received for such activities.
Make no mistake – content spinning is considered black hat SEO and it will get you penalized or removed from Google’s index all together.
This magical SEO plugin Envato is selling is black hat and it will lead you down the path of destruction.
Educate and Protect Yourself!
Please educate yourself before purchasing or installing such SEO plugins. They are not of quality and they will do you much more damage than you thought possible.
Here are some good sources of information to read from Google:
If you read through the above three references you’ll see this plugin and others like it are no good. Not even worth you looking at. So don’t.
Protect yourself, your website, and your ranking.