Article spinning  Article spinning is a writing technique used in search engine optimization (SEO), and other applications, which creates what appears to be new content from what already exists. Content spinning works by replacing specific words, phrases, sentences, or even entire paragraphs with any number of alternate versions to provide a slightly different variation with each spin - also known as Rogeting. This process can be completely automated or written manually as many times as needed. Early content produced through automated methods often resulted in articles which were hard or even impossible to read. However, as article spinning techniques were refined they became more sophisticated, and can now result in perfectly readable articles which appear original. Once considered spamdexing, a black hat SEO practice years ago, the practice is now admitted as a fair way to lower the similarity ratio, resulting large catalogs of more or less similar items. Website authors use article spinning to reduce the similarity ratio of rather redundant pages or pages with thin content, and to avoid penalties in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for using duplicate content. It is also used in other types of applications, such as message personalization and chatbots. Automatic rewriting can change the meaning of a sentence through the use of words with similar but subtly different meaning to the original. 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 database thesaurus to draw from. This ensures that a large percentage of words are different from the original article. The problem with simple automatic writing is that it cannot recognize context or grammar in the use of words and phrases. Poorly-done article spinning can result in unidiomatic phrasing that no human writer would choose. Some may substitute a synonym with the wrong part of speech when encountering a word that can be used as either a noun or a verb, use an obscure word that is only used within very specific contexts, or improperly substitute proper nouns. For example, "Great Britain" could be auto spun to "Good Britain". While "good" could be considered a synonym for "great", "Good Britain" does not have the same meaning as "Great Britain". Article spinning can use a variety of methods; a straightforward one is "spintax". Spintax (or spin syntax) uses a marked-up version of text to indicate which parts of the text should be altered or rearranged. The different variants of one paragraph, one or several sentences, or groups of words or words are marked.