How to Rewrite a Blog Post and Make it Rank in Search

Rewriting a blog post can mean two very different things, and it can depend on where the source post happens to be. If the source of the content is someone else’s post, you’re walking a thin moral line.

Spinning Versus Rewriting

If you read the intro paragraph and you thought “oh, he’s talking about article spinning!” you’re a little off base. There’s a difference between spinning content and rewriting content.

Spinning content is an automated process usually using a dictionary of “spintax”, the list of alternate words and phrases that can be substituted for each other. Now take that sentence and compare it to: “Whirling content is an automatic process broadly utilizing a thesaurus of ‘spintax’, a list of alternative phrases and words that can be switched out for one another.”

See how the two mean basically the same thing. But the second one isn’t quite right? You have a few uses of words or phrases that don’t come up in natural writing. You also have the substitution of “whirling” for “spinning” which, in a thesaurus, mean the same thing. However, we’re talking about a named process called Spinning - not the generic action of spinning, so it removes the meaning from the sentence.

Article spinning can be done in two ways. It can be done in an automated way; you feed content into a machine that puts content back out with a costume on. You then post that as-is to your blog and shrug and move on - the tactic most automatically-created spam blogs use. It’s also extremely obvious to most users that something is off about the content, even if they don’t know what or why. Google, with its refined systems, is well-equipped to find it for what it is and will penalize a site for it, and that’s also the case if they can find the source site.

Google has long understood how content manipulation tools work. They can reverse-engineer spintax patterns and cross-reference content at scale - it’s pretty easy for them to detect when content is spun, even if they can’t always find the original source.

The other strategy of spinning starts the same way, but then has a human go over it to remove the worst misuses of words. Things like the spinning → whirling change will be undone, to make sure that the post still reads more or less normally - harder for Google to find these and harder to identify as wrong. But it still usually doesn’t perform well in search. The reason is because it doesn’t bring any value to the table - it’s still just Some Other Article, Redone. It might not be penalized, but it also probably won’t rank in the top few pages in any but the most barren niches.

Rewriting is a different sort of activity. Rewriting content is like manual spinning, with far greater changes. You don’t use a machine and a spintax dictionary. Instead, you boil things down to concepts and facts, basically condensing the post into an outline, and then writing your own version of the post.

You see this sort of thing quite a bit with news reporting. When there are only three facts known about a new phone being released, hundreds of different tech blogs will write what is basically the same post stating those three facts, but in different orders and with different context surrounding them. It works for these news blogs, so why wouldn’t it work with other sites?

Concerns with Rewriting Content

When you’re rewriting content, you want your product to be as original as possible. Essentially, you’re taking facts, stripping out opinions, and making something new. You want your content to be as original as possible - even if it covers the same basic facts.

For example, if I were to write a post about the basics of keyword research, you probably wouldn’t find anything factual that hasn’t been written in other guides on the subject - it’s not like I’ve discovered some innovative secret technique no one else knows about. All keyword research is basically the same. The difference between another post and my post would be more in terms of structure, presentation of information, and value.

For example, look at the keyword research guides published by sites like Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush. They’re comprehensive guides, and I probably wouldn’t be able to outdo them outright. I can learn from them and produce my own version, though. I might take a section about keyword value and condense it into bullet points, linking to related posts along the way. I might expand a section on long-tail keywords to include more recent examples and links to tools I actually use. I might strip out portions that feel dated or irrelevant to my audience and replace them with fresher, more helpful information.

Those are the sorts of changes I mean when I say changing the structure of the post. I’m not taking each sentence and writing it differently; I’m taking the entire post as a whole and changing it to present the information in a way I like. The information is the same, more or less. But it’s presented differently.

This guarantees that my rewritten post won’t be identified as a copy of someone else’s guide. I’d link to some of the same resources, but I’d remove links to services I don’t like and replace them with ones I like.

I can also change elements of the theme of the post. For example, I might take an existing keyword research guide and reframe it as “The Totally Free Guide to Keyword Research.” I could then present the same factual and procedural information, but strip out any links to paid services, replacing them with free alternatives that come as close as possible in functionality. That’s the value addition. Maybe no one else has written a legitimately free keyword research guide at a sufficient depth, and I can own that niche. Or maybe there are a few out there, but they’re either too basic or too advanced - and my version hits the sweet spot.

The number one concern with manual rewriting like this is to make sure nothing is quoted, or spin-quoted. No single sentence or paragraph should be identical or superficially paraphrased from the source content - it should all be original writing, capable of passing any plagiarism checker. Copyright law also reinforces why originality in expression matters, even when the underlying facts are shared.

Concerns of Rank and Value

This means there’s a bit of an opportunity, though the difficulty curve has increased. The search landscape has also shifted considerably. With Google now issuing over 10 ranking updates and rolling out 2-3 Core Updates per year, rankings are more fluid than ever. AI Overviews now appear for a growing number of queries, and data from Seer Interactive’s analysis of 25.1 million impressions found that organic CTR dropped 61% for queries where AI Overviews were present - falling from 1.76% to 0.61%. It’s a real headwind for any content targeting informational keywords, like rewritten guides.

What matters here is to give readers more value than the source post. I don’t mean different value, and this is why it matters. If you deliver value differently - like the “totally free guide” idea above - you’re changing your keyword and goal. For a general guide, what I’d do is open up the top five or ten results for the phrase and extract anything that looks helpful into a working document. I’ll create a rough composite from different posts, with their links and their value, and reorganize it into a logical sequence of topics.

What I end up with is a guide that’s a chimera of the best existing content - it doesn’t copy anything wholesale, and at best it gives more depth on each particular topic than any single post it sourced. It will become a flagship piece of content - something that earns links and rankings not because it copied what was there, but because it legitimately improved on it.

Of course, it probably won’t outrank the source content, because sites like Moz, Ahrefs, and HubSpot have far more SEO power than most independent sites. They have vastly more backlinks and far bigger content libraries of comparable quality. My guide to keyword research might match theirs in quality, but I don’t have hundreds or thousands of equally helpful supporting pieces to push me into the top results - and building that kind of authority takes time.

Yet.

Isn’t This Just Blog Writing?

In a word, yes. One of the open secrets of the internet is that very few bloggers are actually creating truly original content. Most - like basically everyone in the low and middle tiers of blogging - don’t have the resources for it. I could do a case study on my own keyword research, but it’s not very much data and it’s only centered around my sites and my niche. Meanwhile a company like HubSpot has access to the data of their clients and can produce far more findings with statistically significant results.

For those of us without access to primary sources, exclusive information, and advanced techniques derived from personal testing, what do we have left? We take the word of those who have access to that and adapt it in our own way. It’s just writing; it’s just blogging. So how is rewriting different?

Frankly, there’s not much difference. It’s more a matter of process than of result. Everyone sources, cites, and links to other similar content in their blog posts. Really, the only difference is that with rewriting, I start with a structured document of source material and information, as opposed to doing a few searches and keeping some tabs open while I write.

Kind of like a shortcut to the outlining process - it’s not copied content. The opinions are my own, even if they sometimes agree with the sources, and sometimes they won’t.

And, of course, I’m not doing this for everything I write. Ahrefs data on 924,000 pages found that 72% of blog posts achieve half or less of their maximum monthly traffic within just six months, and after two years, 80-90% of pages have fallen to 20% or less of their peak traffic. For less competitive niches, topics where I have personal experience, or opinion-focused pieces, I’ll write original content, draw on my own data, and put forward my own point of view.