Yes you can. I'm tired of repeating this every few months in this forum, but understand this: Google is an algorithm - it cannot think or process documents like humans do (not yet at least), not even close. This IS exactly the major reason (among others) why backlinks will always work. It also means Google uses maths & graphs to understand context and find out what an article is all about. If you can produce content that is relevant to the algorithm, it doesn't matter if the content makes sense or not, Google WILL rank it.
Here is a challenge: produce an article that makes no sense at all to a human but can rank well in top 20-30 with just on-page SEO alone. Basically what you're asking with a few twists - been there, done that lots of times. Now, whether this is actually a viable strategy for making money depends on the specific case and is open for debate.
Remember, your end goal is to convert visitors to buy your/affiliate products, sign up for a service, become a subscriber, etc.. You won't manage to do that with spun content, because humans will read your content now, not an algorithm anymore. This is why as you move to the front page, CTR and other behavioral metrics matter so much more. If you managed to rank number 1 for a spun article which makes no sense and most of your visitors are returning back to the SERP-s in less than 30 seconds, you will drop in the lower end of the front page or even second page very fast despite the fact you might have the best backlinks in the world.
Now, if you want to rank your Tier 1 sites past the front/second page where no human will ever read your content, go ahead and do it, Google will rank you. And your money site will jump in rankings like crazy when your backlinks get found or re-evaluated again.
This is one of the reasons guest posts in REAL sites work extremely well for this, they will rank naturally for keywords in top 100 and if they don't, you can easily force them to rank. They will gain Tier 2 links naturally over time, so you don't have to worry about boosting your backlinks. Remember, these are REAL sites with real visitors run by other webmasters who most probably have the same goal as you: to get traffic and make money. When you buy 1 of these links, it's like you built 10 super web 2.0-s (as I define them) each with a Tier 2 backlink profile.
The drawback? They are much more expensive and most importantly harder to acquire. You need social skills more than you do analytical ones. But they are well worth it. Your competitors that use shitty 1-page PBN-s won't be able to keep up the pace with you. That's because they need quite a few more times PBN links to outrank you. The power you get from a PBN link is nothing compared to the one you get from a guest post, especially if your network consists of sites with 15-30 RD-s and low PR (internal page rank). To take these PBN links to another level would require almost the same effort you put on the money site, if not more, which makes absolutely no freaking sense financially unless you don't care about money and are just experimenting.
Another drawback is niche selection. If you have an Amazon affiliate site, it will be much harder if not impossible sometimes to acquire links from related authority sites in your niche, which is why most affiliates rely on PBN links to rank. In competitive niches however which are even worthy of news coverage, the situation is different. Guest posts provide the edge while PBN links are now considered a necessity, not the upper hand anymore. Just like web 2.0-s are a necessity in low-medium competition niches. Your competitors have backlink profiles of PBN links, guest posts, web 2.0-s, real natural links, internal links from other high ranking pages, social shares, etc... if you can't keep up in that kind of competition, you won't make it. And PBN links alone won't help you.
So, my suggestion, depending on what your niche is: don't buy 20 spun PBN links in shitty sites, buy a handful of guest posts, take care of the on-page SEO in those posts to rank in top 100 for your keywords, link out to your site in key places on your post and the rest will be done by Google. Over time, your post will increase in PR if the owner is actively maintaining the site (which means he is ranking for related keywords) and your backlinks will be so much more powerful. That is why sometimes when a competitor outranks you for a few days, you might jump right back at your previous spot without doing anything. However, in low competition niches, don't bother. It's much more viable financially to buy PBN domains and make 1/5-pager sites with spun content than spend money, effort and time scouting for guest posts.
