Article Spinning – What Do You Think?

Article Spinning annoys the heck out of me. According to Wikipedia, the definition for Article Spinning is:

Article spinning is a search engine optimization technique by which blog or website owners attempt to manipulate their rank on Google and other search engines. It works by rewriting existing articles, or parts of articles, and replacing elements to avoid being penalized in the Search Engine Results pages (SERP) for using duplicate content. The original articles are often plagiarized from other websites and can often also be copyright infringements if the original article was used without the copyright owner’s permission.

The problem with article spinning is that typically it is not one writer choosing to spin their own articles. I don’t love the idea of that either, but it’s better than what appears to be happening.

I’m constantly going on websites, blogs and doing searches for something and find really poorly written articles that are the same as someone else. I’ve found my own articles this way. At a former site I used to write for, a writer didn’t spin articles but they used my previous articles to re-write their own version. It drove me crazy and did lead to my leaving the site and not speaking too highly about them anymore (simply because it was a problem that could have been addressed and instead they just swept it under the rug.)

But article spinning is worse, in that the only thing they usually change in the article are keywords and certain words… for instance, they might replace “like” with “adore” or “google” with “search engine” or “rose” with “flower”. The problem with the replacing of the words, is that often the articles simply don’t make sense but when google or any other search engine comes crawling, it finds a “new” article and assumes that it is legit. It sucks for the original writer.

I can guarantee that any content you find on any site that I do or have written for, is mine and only mine. I would never even attempt article spinning, simply because I am too much of a perfectionist. It was disheartening however, to do a search on an extremely popular article of mine on a site and find not only had it been spun, but it had also been “scraped” which I will explain more at another date. It’s really annoying. Don’t call yourself a writer if you aren’t going to create quality content that belongs to YOU and not others.

What are your thoughts on article spinning?

Popularity: 2% [?]