from the desk of . . . Ken Nadreau

Before I officially declare war on the practice of article spinning, it might be prudent to get some feedback from people both pro and con. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the way I see it, article spinning is lazy and unprofessional, it creates very bad articles and fills the web with repetitive, useless information, and is contributing to the demise of article directories who get hit with the real duplicate content penalties.

Maybe it’s because I find writing fun and easy, or maybe it’s because I strive to share new information with my readers whenever I can, but spewing out variations of the same content just doesn’t seem like a good idea. What do you think?

Do people who spin articles really think readers only visit one article directory to get their info? They’d have to if they think its wise to submit a different variation of an article to each directory. But anyone who might visit several directories or get content through aggregation would quickly see that two articles say the same basic thing and are just worded differently.

Or maybe they just don’t think people (or the search engines) are paying that much attention.

I remember when spinning content meant writing a generic “template” piece that could be used for a number of different niches. All you had to do was insert the niche keywords to make the content apply.

But this method targeted different keywords and markets. For example, you could take the template content and insert keywords related to “dog training,” then take the same template and convert it to “cat training,” or “raising a chimpanzee.” However, this idea was mostly geared toward eBook creation, and so the similarities of content didn’t have any effect on the search engines or any content repositories like an article directory.

And targeting different markets usually meant the possibility of one reader getting more than one variation was remote. But article spinning raises the likelihood of a reader seeing multiple variations by a very large probability percentage.

I personally like using things like Google Alerts and Google Reader to get some good information. It doesn’t happen very often on Reader, but almost every day I get Google Alerts filled with notifications of articles coming down the pike that are obviously spun. When I see them, I quickly discard the content and lean toward those I know are written by professional writers who’ve taken the time to submit clean and original content.

These are the people who most likely know what they’re talking about who I’d more likely listen to, and take recommendations from. They are the real teachers, whereas people who just spin all day are more the hard sellers.

Does this make sense to you? Can you see why I’m on the verge of declaring all out war on article spinning?

Please comment below?

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