Some people ask us if AutoBlogged can rewrite or spin articles to avoid duplicate content penalties when adding posts from other RSS feeds. Although you can do some simple rewriting using the Search and Replace feature it is pretty limited and we generally do not recommend it for other than simple substitutions.

Article spinning is a technique of rewriting words in an article to avoid duplicate content penalties in search engines while maintaining the basic meaning of the article. Most article spinning techniques involve randomly replacing certain words or phrases based on a database of synonyms

We generally do not recommend article spinning. Although the content may look different to a search engine, a human can easily spot a spinned article and sometimes synonyms may produce unexpected results and actually hurt search engine placement. Furthermore, there is a fine line between autoblogging and plagiarizing. Using small content excerpts of someone else’s article to provide added value (as in the case of Google News or Technorati) is generally an accepted (or at least tolerable) practice.

However, spinning someone else’s content to plagiarize and avoid detection can quickly get your site flagged as spam and significantly (and sometimes permanently) penalized in the search engines. Furthermore, article spinning gives autobloggers in general a bad name and many are quick to label all autoblogs as spam sites.

For the most part, autoblogs are not affected by duplicate content penalties, especially if you only use fair excerpts and pull from a variety of sources. In fact, using small excerpts can improve your keyword density which often results in ranking higher than the original articles.

Having said that, if you still wish to avoid duplicate content detection, one tool we recommend is the WP Uniquefier Plugin, which does not affect the readability of an article. WP Spinner is another WordPress plugin, although we have not tested this.