Article spinning is a search engine optimization technique by which blog or website owners attempt to manipulate their rank on Google and other search engines. It works by replacing elements of articles plagiarized from other websites to avoid being penalized for duplication.

Website owners may pay writers to to perform spinning manually, rewriting all or part of articles. Writers may also spin their own articles manually or automatically, allowing them to sell the same articles with slight variations to a number of clients. There are a number of programs which will automatically replace words or phrases in articles. For example, blog owners using Wordpress can install a RSS feed plugin and an article re-writing plugin. The RSS feed plugin feeds the blog with articles from web sites, blogs or search engines that offer an RSS news feed. The re-writing plugin automatically changes the content of each article word-for-word. For example, the word "picture" could be replaced by the word "image" or "photo". Thousands of word-for-word combinations are stored in either a text file or a database to draw from. This ensures that a large percentage of words are different to the original article fed from the original blog, web site or search engine news feed.

Although article spinning may, at least for now, fool the search engines, it produces pages that are of poor quality for humans to read. Spinning software changes the original words to words with similar meanings to generate the new content. The fallacy behind word exchanges is that true synonyms are scarce in any language. The software is likely to corrupt the meaning of the text by indiscriminate exchanging of words. In English, for example, the nouns dame, broad, wench, slut, "woman", and lady are all terms that might be used to describe a female human. These words have shades of meaning that range from respectful to insulting. Now consider the consequences of spinning articles that are intended to promote a website selling clothing for women.

Google penalizes any web site that has duplicated content on it. The higher percentage of duplication, the higher Google sets the penalties. The duplication of web content may also break copyright law in many countries. See, for example, the United States Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.