Article Spinning, Bad or Good.
After receiving many emails about article spinning, I decided to summarize all my replies in to an article.
Article Spinning
Okay. Search the forums and blogs and you’ll find people either vehemently for them or equally vehemently against them. There isn’t “one answer” about this, simply because there are different ways and reasons of using this kind of software.
What is an article spinner?
An article spinner is a piece of software that offers replacement words and phrases for text that you select. For example, selecting the word “and”, and the software would present you with replacement options such as “plus”, “also”, “as well”, and so on.
Once all the words / phrases have had replacement text added, the software then “spins” the resulting article, so as to make tens or hundreds of versions of the original article.
What is the point of an article spinner?
You start off with one original article. You spin it, and product hundreds of original versions. These can then be submitted to article directories, blogs, sites etc as original. Many sites only like to publish original content, so the software helps you meet that need, while promoting your site / product / service. Also, there is the ongoing debate as to whether Google penalizes duplicate content, so this is a way to overcome it.
Article Spinning – Against
Really there is only one argument against spinners – that they produce unreadable results.
There is also an underlying fear of them by several article directories, with one prominent article directory actually refusing any articles about them, or any articles with links to web sites that promote them!
Article Spinning – For
Pretty obvious really – having the ability to mass produce original content. Content still is king on the net, and the absolute best way for long-term website promotion. Adding content regularly to your website shows the search engines that you’re a lively site worth visiting; shows visitors that it’s worth repeat visits; and using articles on other sites to steadily build back-links, increases your websites “authority”.
Let’s deal with the against, that spun articles are unreadable. Remember the old adage “garbage in garbage out”? Spun articles will only be as good as the effort put in to spinning them. Yes, you could whiz through the process and spin an article in a few minutes – result garbage. Or, you could invest a bit more time, making sure that the results are going to be intelligible – result, a new original article.
The argument that article spinners by their nature are all rubbish is not supportable. I’ve used spinners to produce articles that no one would know went through a spinner – it just involved me investing a bit more time in the process.
The result is that hundreds of articles are likely to stay published, read, and acted on – rather than deleted or ignored.
But I though spun articles were just for building back-links?
Sure, that’s one purpose. But with Google (which let’s face it is the search engine we all target), continually upgrading it’s algorithms, it’s not going to be long till they find of way of discounting unintelligible content, and the back-links on them. Plus, why waste the opportunity of a human being actually reading the article, visiting your site, and buying something? Surely it’s better to target back-link building and customer acquisition!
What about the “for” proposal, mass producing content.
As far as I can see, there really isn’t a major problem with it. The main issue is to do it steadily over a long timeframe. The search engines aren’t dumb. A sudden 100 or 1000 a day back-links appearing is going to raise red flags. My philosophy is that this kind promotion work should always be for the long-term, on a drip-feed slow, steady, and always appearing random.
So in summary, used with an eye for the long term, article spinning software can play an important part promotion strategy – the key is in using the software properly.
Vic Carrara
Masterwebsoftware.com
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