Article spinning is not a new concept – it has been around there for a couple of years now. For the sake of who are not aware of the same and want to promote their blogs and improve traffic overnight, I am writing about the same.

What is article spinning?
Article spinning basically refers to the process of submitting an article and 100s of its variants to a number of directories or blogs in one shot so that a large number of references or backlinks are created to your blog. It is one of the easiest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques though not always ethical and nice.

Creating several variations of an article can be both manual and automated processes. In the case of manual creation basically the author or a human has to rewrite an article by changing the content a little bit here and there or restructure it so that for a search engine spider it looks like new. But this is a time consuming process as one could as well write new articles altogether for the time they spend. However there are automated mechanisms like wordpress plugins and article spinning software that can take an article input and spin them into 100s of variations by replacing a number of words with their synonyms and equivalents. The spin does not happen on the content alone but on tags as well. Some software may even add similar tags or remove some. There are also a number of sites that offer free and paid services for article spinning. Though I have with me a number of such sites, I am not publishing it here as personally I am not a subscriber to the idea of spinning articles.

When you spin an article using automated systems, there are several side effects. Basically, the word replacements may make an article sound really stupid as the grammar and usages may not be appropriate. If you want to spin your own articles and put your name there as the author, you may not want to see a number of grammatical errors appearing in thousands of sites around the web!

Bad ethics!
Spinning your own articles has the merits and demerits but that is relevant to you alone. But there are a bunch of lazy bloggers out there who steal others articles (even copyrighted material) and publish in their own name after spinning. This is a real bad thing and they can get punished (see below). Even if they don’t, it is ethically wrong to republish somebody’s stuff without giving credits to them. If a blogger wants to post others’ article on their sites, they should ideally use trackbacks and even mention the author’s name.

Possible consequences of article spinning
As I mentioned earlier, the article spinning is done with the sole intention of getting more visibility with the search engines (and some referral traffic as well). However, search engines like Google does not quite like to see some site getting popular overnight and hence would penalize them once caught. Those who are promoting duplicate content will definitely loose their search ranks or page rank if they get audited for duplicate content or sudden rise in backlinks.

The genuine long term readership can have a negative impact if your audience sees your ‘spun’ articles with mediocre quality elsewhere. This is the biggest side effect because as a blogger you want the patronage to be maintained over the years.

The other issue is that the spun articles may be posted on various sites that you don’t even know for their content and quality. Some of them may even have rated content or related to warez or have legally banned material. This can really spoil the goodwill!

If you opt to spin others’ copyrighted material, you may even end up in jail according to the US Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA). Refer this site for more details.

Better alternatives
If you genuinely want to build backlinks and reference traffic, one of the best ways is to become a guest blogger and post your genuine articles at a higher PR site that you know. The spun articles may give you 1000s of backlinks but many of them may not be from high PR (page rank) sites. So the better proposition is to post one or two articles at a very high PR and good quality blog.

Commenting - with genuine interest and after reading the content thoroughly - on other blogs is another great way to increase your link popularity as well as your knowledge. The comment kahuna software that I recommended sometime back will be of definite help here as long as you are truthful in your approach.