Spun Articles. What say you?

Maybe so! Let's see how this poll goes. Maybe the topic deserves another type of poll.

Funny ... it feels like no time at all since most of this recent thread's 170+ posts explained in such detail why most professional article marketers think it's a waste of time, and based on fallacies and mistaken beliefs about "duplicate content".

As I remember, there were two or three people promoting spinning services who disliked the thread and disagreed with everyone else, but that's always going to be so, you know? However often it's discussed, there'll always be a small handful of people, with financial interests of their own involved, dissenting from the widespread agreement on this subject.

I've spun articles too but as DarrenHaynes says, you have to make sure you choose your synonyms carefully so that whichever synonym is used, the article will still read sensibly.

Lately though, I've taken to just posting two versions. One for my own sites that I've carried out some SEO on. The other for article syndication that I haven't bothered using SEO on. And for that I do a complete re-write.

The article syndication is just for backlinks to help the original article to rank in Google.

What you're actually saying here is that article submission sites, overall, provide better link-juice than profiles. That's perfectly true (though they're both pretty bad, collectively), but it has nothing to do with whether they're "spun".

The value of a given backlink, on a given page, doesn't somehow magically improve because the content to which it's attached is "spun" rather than "syndicated".

In other words, your observation's entirely valid, as far as it goes, but it actually has nothing to do with "spinning" at all.

If Google finds them and credits the backlink(s), then they're "indexed", for backlinking purposes, aren't they? Sometimes in the supplemental index instead of in the main index, but the backlink still "counts". And they're not "duplicate content", for these purposes, anyway. This little article explaining what "duplicate content" means, in this context, may help you.

This concurrent thread may also interest you.

This subject comes up so often and the debate at times becomes heated. I think the reason it comes up so often is that it lacks a definition. I posted this on my blog a while back: What is meant by spinning an article?

Definitions

Traditionally, spinning has been and is associated with articles that are gibberish. I have read material on the web that can only have been written by a robot, or perhaps by a third grade foreigner attempting to learn to read and write English. The results are much less than acceptable. In fact, they are abominable.

If that is spinning, then it should surely be banned from the web. It is quite obvious that no human ever looked at the article before it was published on the web.

I can only conclude that the article was composed by one of those automated non-human spinning services. Although, I have never used spinning services and I can only speak from my observation. And, my observation is not quantified.

It appears as if the material is generated by substituting synonyms for specific words or by substituting phrases. The results seem to be generated without human intervention.

Another definition could be that of rewriting an article with some human intervention. The author selects specific words or phrases and allows the software to generate articles based on those substitutions.

Again, human intervention is limited and the results often require significant editing to make the article ready for web publication. Of course, some article marketers may be only interested in SEO and publish the material "as is" resulting in sometimes nonsensical verbiage or at best second or third grade reading material.

If the definition of spinning an article falls within either of these two definitions or methods, then I must agree with the naysayers and ask that all such work be banned from the internet. This is where the debate fails to distinguish between the traditional limited definition and a definition that is more universal.


Repackaged Articles

Few can deny that they have "repackaged" an article to save time or to quell a writer's block. Rewriting or repackaging an article is acceptable.

A publisher-editor of a well known and popular article directory once said, "Repackaged, rewritten articles on the same subject are hardly ever 100% unique." He also said, "... the use of existing articles reworded or not, is not an issue."

Given that even repackaged rewritten articles are hardly ever 100% unique; would it be far fetched to describe those articles as spun articles? I think not.

So the hotly debated spinning issue comes down to what kind of spun articles are acceptable. It is not whether or not articles should be spun; it is rather how they should be spun and how they are used. That spun articles are acceptable is a fact. The quality of spun articles and their use are the issues.

Now that we have established that rewritten spun articles are not an issue what remains is a debate over the quality and use of those articles.

Two Schools

Obviously, there are two schools of thought. One school believes that spinning is wrong, bad, spamming, and black hat. The other claims that spinning is useful, not spamming, and good for SEO.

The first school holds that view simply because of their limited definition of spinning. I doubt that not at least one of them have written on the same topic more than once. That they have, regardless of whether they used an existing article as a template or not, they put a new or different twist on the subject and in that sense the article was spun.

Fully Automated Services

One method is to use a spinning service. You submit an article to this service and they generate spun articles which then you can use or not. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, most often, the results are abominable.

Automated Human Assisted

Another method uses software that takes an article and replaces words that you identify with synonyms. This gives much better results than the first method. However, the results are still very often less than acceptable and require significant rewrites and editing to make them worthy of publication.

Human Generated Auto-Assisted

There is a third method that does generate high quality, informative, and unique content. In its strictest sense, this method is one of rewriting an article. The author rewrites the original article on a sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph basis. An article with a sufficient number of paragraphs can be rewritten paragraph by paragraph. It will yield countless high quality unique articles.

With the magic of randomizing software and the truth of mathematics, thousands of unique articles in the eighty plus percentile of uniqueness can be created. Even the closest of scrutiny would find it difficult to determine the originals.

What is the problem? How are properly rewritten articles spun or not spun, not valid informative quality articles? Negative responses elude me.

C.A. Perez