Spun content - works only if it is high quality and you spin within certain limits so you don't end up with too higher similarity between articles at an n-gram level. Also has to be readable and grammatically correct. If you have lots of sentences like "the dog as a prestigious foot with white rising of the hat" while grammatically correct will only generate low frequency n-grams as per statistical natural language processing methods applied on a large corpus like Google's internal n-grams database. While a single sentence like that within a larger article having normal n-gram frequency counts, will pass unnoticed by the Google software, having an entire article with low-frequency n-grams could be detected as unusual/spam/automated crap. I am not saying they check things this thoroughly but they might. That being said, taking sentences about cars - "Pontiac announced the launch of a new
car in September..." and making it about digital cameras by replacing a noun - "Pontiac announced the launch of a new
digital camera in September...", will work. Software will not figure it out what you did so far, as this would require a true knowledge database not just a large text corpus to do statistical NLP on. Obviously if a competitor analyzes your link sources and finds a network of sites like that, it will know what you did and could report you, then a Google manual moderator will flag your site. That is why it is good to have a solid foundation of relevant text for your topic. So highly complex spinning (multi-level) that generates grammatically correct and more than that, coherent text, is best. Spinning is not dead, it is just done at very poor quality and/or abused (spun too many times from a simple seed source like word-level only synonym replacement).
That being said, even absolute crappy/random mixing of actual scraped sentences works at this time. You just want to keep all that content under the radar and don't forget to also build very high quality links as well. If you plan to build for long term, then invest more time and resources in your content generation and spinning though. Google gets better and better at detecting crap.
Link wheels - in their classical form, or similar to the classical form (having a regular pattern / linking scheme - e.g. a circle) will be detected. However if you heavily randomize the inking structure you become undetectable. There are quite a few details here to get a good balance between efficiency and stealthiness though. Having 2-post blogs interlinked even randomly is not the brightest idea. Real sites don't link out from every post and have many pages not just 2-3. There are some research papers on detecting link spam so read those for a start.
The rule of thumb is: if you put a drop of piss in a glass of water it will still taste like water. However, if you put a lot of piss in the water it will taste like piss, or at least taste funny. You want your sites to taste like the purest mountain water straight from the spring not stink from a mile like a public toilet. This is where the difference between successful blackhat and retarded blackhat lies. Noobs just blast away the techniques. Pros, do it with taste, elegance and paying attention to details. Look like running a SEO operation like running an organized crime structure. If you go shooting and screaming into a bank to rob money you will eventually get out in a body bag. On the other hand if you manage to get your man elected as the president of the country, or a large percentage of the senate, you're a winner and all you have to manage is flow. Flow of money, of wishes, of worries, of whatever. But in fact, you are 100% legal
Just look how the world is run and reduce the principles to your personal scale. Or not. Go buy yourself a few senators
