Is Article Spinning Ethical?

If you're at all concerned about your website rankings, you have probably run across an SEO technique called article marketing. In a nutshell, article marketing consists of writing articles in your niche that can help establish you as an expert in your field. Along with each article, you can submit links that point back to your website. Those links are beneficial for referring readers to your site, but they are also useful for accruing backlinks, an enormously important aspect of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Where article spinning comes into play is that search engines (namely Google) are thought to have algorithms that de-emphasize links coming from duplicate content. So if you have 30 identical copies of an article in Google's index on different sites, they will not all receive the same "weight" or value in calculating your site's rankings.

Article spinning sprung up as a technological way to produce multiple unique copies of the same article. You write the article once, code it for spinning to provide alternate variations of words, sentences, paragraphs, titles, and even backlinks, then submit those randomly unique copies to different article directory sites. The idea is that those 30 formerly identical articles will now be unique and count more heavily toward Google's ranking of your site.

So now that we know a little of the backdrop of article spinning, let's answer a few questions.

Is Article Spinning Legal?

Yes, as long as the original content is yours. There is nothing legally wrong with article spinning, provided you own the content or have the legal right to publish it. I make no claim to be a lawyer, but if you think this through for a minute, if you own a book, you are the author and have the right to change it and publish it again under a different name. Whether or not that's a good idea is another question, but that's for you to decide. There is nothing illegal about article spinning.

Is Article Spinning Ethical?

The next question is whether there is anything unethical or immoral about article spinning. Again, the answer is no, not in and of itself. Let's take the case of Disney's ownership of any of its intellectual own properties–for the sake of argument, let's use the example of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney has every legal, moral, and ethical right to produce derivative works from it's own material. They can "spin" movies, as many as they want, kids books for all different age groups, kids sing along videos, etc. It seems there's no end to the ubiquitous Disney storyline spun a thousand times into a big fat bottom line for the company. It's my belief that content "spinning" should not be reserved as an accepted practice only for big corporations. Small business owners have every right to make full use of their intellectual property to produce derivative works using whatever technology they wish if they believe their business will benefit from the practice.

The other side of the coin, however, is that while you have the right to produce derivative works, websites you may want to submit to also have the right to insist on exclusive original works only and/or prohibit publishing of derivative works elsewhere. In my opinion, few websites will try to go there because competition is too great for a constant flow of new content.

While many article websites may take a public stance against article spinning because of legitimate problems with low quality by unethical (or lazy) authors and SEOs, it is ultimately in their own best interest to allow it, as long as quality doesn't suffer too much. This is because if they insist on exclusivity, they stand a good chance of not getting that content submitted to their site. In order to effectively enforce a no-spin rule, the benefit of submitting to them would have to be so great that users would forfeit that right to make derivative uses of that content. In most cases, that's not going to happen.

Does Article Spinning Work?

Yes. Or at least in my experience, it does. When articles are spun well, they produce genuinely unique articles that are entirely readable and useful to the end user. Backlinks from these articles are counted in Google's index, and testing has shown that rankings for the target site improve.

That doesn't mean that Google and other search engines won't try to devalue the effect of article spinning in the future, or that they aren't already working on it. But the fact is, if spinning is done well, it will not be detectable by any algorithm, because the nuances of the English language cannot be entirely codified by machines. Humans are too smart; there are always creative ways to phrase something that rely on context for meaning, and thereby do not rely on a simple thesaurus.

Is Article Spinning Spam?

Here's where we could get into some legitimate but heated debates on all sides of the argument. The bottom line is that article spinning software is a tool. Like any tool, it can be misused and abused. So while article spinning can create spam, and is frequently used for such purposes, it's more accurate to say that article spinning doesn't produce spam, lazy people do. If you want to maintain a high level of quality in your article spinning efforts, you simply need to take the time to do it right. Shortcuts produce spam.

Use the best spinner you can find and invest serious time into writing quality variations of your words, sentences, and paragraphs to produce truly unique and compelling derivative works of your original article. Never, ever use article spinning software in automated mode. To avoid producing garbage, always make sure each spun option makes sense and sounds natural. This takes time, but human effort is the primary difference between spam and genuine content.

What's The Best Spinner Software?

I've tried many different article spinning software and web-based solutions, and none compares with this one. It is truly the best spinning software around, allowing you to easily select word, phrase, and sentence options from suggested choices, or letting you enter your own variation. The cool thing is that word and phrase choices are entered into a central database and weighted by popularity, so the more users use the system, the better it gets. HOWEVER...don't ever use any spinning tool, no matter how good it is, without human intervention and sentence by sentence editing. If you do, you will produce garbage that will just clutter up the Internet.

Where Can I Submit Spun Articles?

By far, outside of a few high PageRank sites, the most productive places to submit spun articles are blog networks. Add one Wordpress site to the first recommended network on this list and you'll get 250 credits per month for blog posts. Since each post can contain up to 3 links, that means you can have 750 backlinks per month from independent, geographically diverse, unique Class C IP addresses. You can add up to 49 more sites to the network for an additional 50 credits per month. That is a ton of one-way links. It's inexpensive and it works. That means if you have the infrastructure, you could build a network that would allow you 2700 blog posts per month for a total of 8100 backlinks per month. That's a lot of content and a lot of backlinks!

Of course, there are many other places you can go to submit quality spun content. Here's just a short list of my favorite sites to submit spun articles.