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There seems to be a lot of discussion online these days about the ethics of Article Spinning. However, before we get into the ethics issue a brief description of article spinning may be helpful if this type of article marketing is unknown to you. 

What Is Article Spinning?

The goal of article spinning is to turn one article into many unique articles that can pass search engine duplicate content filters.  This is done by substituting words sentences or even paragraphs with suitable variations and then randomizing them to create new documents. You would imagine that such software would output garbage and that’s exactly what early article spinners did, however modern article spinners can output highly readable and grammatically correct articles. 

The end result is tens or even hundreds of unique articles that you can then submit to article directories and syndication sites. Because each article is unique it won’t trip duplicate content filters used by search engines and many more rankings and back links can be gained. And that’s all very believable, however a well quoted document ‘Article Spinning or Article Sinning’ points to many reasons why this might not be the case.

Is Article Spinning Ethical?

Let’s start by looking at Wikipedia’s take on article spinning:

• 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.

Spinning Your Own Articles

Article marketing is a time tested and highly successful marketing tactic. It’s a great way to promote you, your business or organization, your website, your products or services to your target market.  There are hundreds of article directories online where you can upload articles, some of the best known are EzineArticles, GoArticles and Idea Marketers. There are may also be directories specific to your niche which can improve reader numbers and click through as well as providing back links.

If you are spinning and publishing your own articles on any of these sites its doubtful if anyone would consider it unethical as long as they remain readable.

Spinning Private Label Rights Articles

Private Label Rights Articles or PLR Articles are essentially articles written by somebody else that you can modify and publish as your own. When you buy PLR articles you buy the right to modify, include links, and even put your own name to it. Again it would be difficult to say that putting an article spinner to work on PLR articles would be seen as unethical. However, with PLR remember that there may be hundreds of article marketers using the same PLR articles as you, this makes it a little more difficult to create articles that are truly original. When using PLR articles as source material whether you are rewriting manually or spinning the articles its always best to check the final results using Copyscape to check for similarities with other web pages.

Spinning Other Peoples Articles Without Their Consent

This is simply plagiarism; even if the final article is unrecognizable it is still plagiarism. The 1995 Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, defines plagiarism as “use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.” Unfortunately, many spammers see article spinning as a quick way to make an extra buck at the expense of the author who took the time and effort to research and write the original work.

Article spinners have come a long way in their brief history and are becoming so sophisticated it is virtually impossible to distinguish the spun articles they output. This is great if you are spinning your own articles, it has also made article spinning the tools of choice amongst many spammers and black hat SEOs. However, as far as ethics are concerned it not the article spinning software that is at fault, it comes down to how it is used.