Is Article Spinning Legal?

Article spinning is the process of taking an article and rewording it in such a fashion that search engines don't see it as a duplicate thus improving it's rankings in searches. This puts a new 'spin' on an article to make it seem fresh to search engines and helps to populate individuals blogs; especially those that are monetized with ads such as Google Adsense.

There are three ways to spin an article. You can either do it yourself manually, pay someone to do it for you in which you usually pay by the word or use article spinning software. Article spinning software is usually a bad idea as it usually makes the spun version sound pretty strange and carries some bad grammar or leaves important detail out of the finished article.

The ethics and legalities around spinning articles is somewhat controversial and it really depends on the circumstances.

While it is perfectly fine to spin your own content and post it elsewhere, it may cause you some problems down the road. Also, if you are having that much of an issue coming up with original content for your audience, you may want to reconsider why you write in the first place.

Spinning someone else's content however is a different issue. This is actually illegal and could get your page removed, DE-indexed or even a lawsuit. Spinning someone's content and claiming it as your own is illegal even if the wording and ordering is different. If the original writer can prove the similarities between their original work and the 'spun' version of the same article, it is very likely that they would win the argument. See the following page for some very good information: http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/online-intellectual-property/article-spinning-and-copyright-infringement

I recently found one of my Hubs that was spun into a very poorly 'written' article. Many of the details were left out and some of them were just flat out wrong! The unfortunate part of this is, that the person who spun my article started stealing about 58 page views per day from me. That may not seem like a lot, however, it comes to just about 95% of my traffic on that particular Hub.

Rather than sitting back and letting this happen, I decided to do four things about it.

1. I edited the Hub that was spun after doing a lot of keyword research and strategically placed the keywords throughout my Hub. This was a little difficult from an SEO perspective because I didn't want the content to sound like a robot wrote it. I like to keep my Hubs pretty warm and personal.
2. I contacted the company that was responsible for hosting the content with an official DMCA notice and asked them to remove the content immediately.
3. I filed a claim with the search engines to remove the content from indexing. I've had pretty good luck with this, especially with Google. Doing this is very helpful, since if you can't get the person to take down the spun content, then getting it removed from search engine results will render it fairly useless anyway.
4. I wrote this Hub to make other people aware and in the end, hopefully help someone else in my situation.

Overall, I believe that this covers most of the pros and cons of article spinning. In my opinion, there really is no upside to this method of generating articles. It's always best to use your brain and your imagination and write some real and original content. People will respect you a lot more for it and you won't come off sounding like you're from outer space.

Please let me know your experiences with article spinning and how you recovered from it.

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