Are Article Spinners Any Good?
A pet peeve of any article marketer is that it takes a lot of time to change each article here and there, so that different article directories accept it, and Google does not deem it a duplicate content. But what can you do? We don’t have much time, and writing a completely unique article each time for each directory is real hard. In fact, in many cases it may even not provide a bang for a buck that you have to produce to succeed, even if all you spend is your own free time.
When anybody has a need, the market provides a solution. In this case, the market got a number of so called article spinners. The idea of an article spinner is simple: it goes through your article and replaces words with synonyms, which supposedly mean the same. Some advanced article spinners may also change a sentence structure here and there, again, assumingly, without impacting the meaning.
But do they work?
I did a simple experiment with one of my articles. Let me share just one example of the resulting monstrosity.
I had a sentence “Viral marketing is a craze, but will it work for you?” The article spinner, I used, replaced it with “Viral marketing is crazy, but that works for you?” Ouch… Here comes the first Achilles’ foot of the article spinners: synonyms are not arbitrarily replaceable. Each of them has a special meaning, that’s why they coexists in the language. As soon as your command of the language allows you to use these subtle differences, articles spinners won’t be able to handle your texts.
So, are classic article spinners any good? Can you use them for anything productive?
Ironically, I found that the answer is yes, although not what they are supposed to be used for. When you rewrite an article, your original text makes it real hard to deviate and produce a different content. After all, you really picked the words well when you wrote it in the first place. However, pass it through an article spinner, and it will damage it so much, that you’ll have no problem with the memories of the original article. Fixing a monstrosity is much easier that cannibalizing your own creation.
So, are article spinners any good? As a source of the content for submission, no, but they can provide a great inspiration to do their job by hand. Just don’t overpay for them.
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