Should You Ever Use an Article Spinner?

If you’re just looking for a quick answer to the question above and don’t want to be bothered with reading everything I have to say on the subject, I’ll tell you: the answer is probably not. Using an article spinner is rarely a good idea, especially since the creation of the new Google Panda update.
Now, that having been said, there are some things to know about article spinners which mean that there may be times that they are useful.

What Is An Article Spinner?

Let’s start with this basic question for the newbs. Just what is an article spinner anyway? Basically, it’s a piece of software that can take your writing and making into dozens of new versions of the same content. The reason why you might want to use an article spinner is to get around Google’s duplicate content filter. This is especially problematic if you are trying to build links back to your blog, since Google will ignore duplicate content.

Why Article Spinners Don’t Work

The problem with article spinners, as anyone who has tried to use one knows, is that they do an absolutely horrible job of spinning articles. To give you an example, I took the first few sentences of this article from the New York Times and spun it using a typical article spinner. Here are the results:
Google most popular website on the planet is dealing with the second most popular website. Course on Facebook
Otherwise why Google many times, the same kind of social networks?
The one good thing I can say about it is that I needn’t worry about copyright violation from the New York Times since this is just gobbledygook. Unfortunately, this same material is likely to be ignored under Google’s Panda update.

A Second Kind of Spinner

I have written in the past about other kinds of article spinners, such as Unique Article Wizard.  In theory, these spinners work much better because they don’t work based on changing words but instead based on selecting different paragraphs. For example, the following three sentences are different but could be used interchangeably:
Generally, I find that article spinners are extremely unreliable and a waste of time.
In my experience, I have found that virtually all article spinners do a really bad job.
I’ve tried lots of article spinners and have by and large been very disappointed with the results.
As you can see, each sentence is unique but basically says the same thing. By creating whole paragraphs of around 3-4 sentences each like this and then having around 10 such paragraphs, you can use a program like Unique Article Wizard to do the job because it will simply splice and dice the paragraphs so that they create articles which are around 70% unique. Usually, that’s enough to fool Google’s filters, though with the Panda update, I’m not so sure anymore.
The problem I have with such spinners is that they are very time consuming and difficult to use. You can’t just write three articles on the same subject. You have to write three articles with the exact same number of paragraphs, all of which say the exact same thing and you have to have enough paragraphs to create a reasonable amount of unique content. Not to mention that the paragraphs have to line up so they are interchangeable. It’s an awful lot of work and it’s very easy to screw it up and do a really bad job.

Another Form of Article Spinner

Finally, there is a third form of article spinner which simply gives me a huge headache to even think about using. This kind uses the pipe method. In essence, you have to write your sentences as follows: I {think | believe} that {article spinners | article spinning software} is a {waste of time | bad idea}.
In theory, this should work to create quality articles, however you have to be very careful that all your words work together (they don’t in the above example – see if you can spot where the grammar would break down) and frankly, I don’t know anyone who can effectively write something this way on a regular basis. It just isn’t the way human beings think and the results I’ve seen from such things tend to be disastrous.

When Article Spinning Is a Good Idea

Okay, now that I’ve finished knocking down article spinners, there are two occasions where I’d say it is a good idea. First, there are certain websites which are designed as article farms and where no one is actually likely to read the content.
In these cases, you could use a spinner to create 100 different versions of your article and pick out the 10-20 that don’t seem super horrible and upload them. No one is likely to read these articles and they may provide a very minimal amount of link juice to you if you use them. The thing is, with the Panda update, such sites are worth less and less, so I wouldn’t put much stock in them.
The other time when article spinners can be useful is with social media. Social Monkee for example uses an article spinner for submissions. However, in this case, it’s a sentence or two set up using the pipe method, not an entire article. Writing a sentence or two that way still gives me a headache, but I at least find it doable to create such things and submissions with Social Monkee and other sites like it become more valuable when they aren’t flagged as duplicate content by Google.