Do you Spin your Articles for Article Marketing?

Due to the recent Panda/Content Farm update at Google, the Article Marketing methods of recent years of writing a short article and submitting it to various article directories for backlinks and new exposure seems to be challenged.  While there are many websites accepting articles, most seem to be requesting articles that are ONLY for that site.

Web 2.0 Sites are getting strict

I noticed this message this morning in Hubpages:

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• Hubs with text that is substantially duplicated from other sites are now completely prohibited
• Hubs must contain at least 50 words of original text for each Amazon or eBay product that is configured to be displayed
• Hubs can no longer use an Amazon, eBay, Link, News, or RSS capsule as the first full width capsule in a hub

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I really like the idea of requiring at least 50 words of original text per product displayed since I don't think social sites really should be use for in-your-face product promotion so if they can't say more than just a list of products the article should get rejected. I always thought that product lists that are just product lists should be on your own website or blog.

Notice how they are not allowing the same article to be used or an article only partially rewritten since the duplicated content will be substantial.  Although they don't mention percents, I'm sure this is to go against copied content and people who rewrite the title and first paragraph only before adding an article from another site (like their blog).

Squidoo also recently started reminding users about the need for original content. When I checked the blog for the article that was linked to the user dashboard, I found a link to this FAQ.

While the FAQ reminds people not to use content by others with out permission (you know not to steal photos and text right) and to not be excessive with quotes from Wikipedia and other creative commons websites question #7 addresses the article marketing issue.

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Q: I write a lot of articles elsewhere, and I want to post them on Squidoo too. May I?

A: Careful here. Squidoo is a place for original content. That means it's not recycled in several places, verbatim, around the web. Surely since it's your content you can link it all together, but please remember to excerpt yourself. Don't post an entire article of yours here AND somewhere else. Rather, use your lens to excerpt your favorite parts of your own article, maybe share a little more background behind it, add something that is truly unique to the lens only, and have fun.

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Again we have the push for minimal content duplication just like Hubpages and I wouldn't be surprised if article directories start to follow this and require original articles too.  Ezinearticles which greatly affected by the search engine changes now requires 400 words or more and twice as many quality checks as before with an emphasis on good language use. Which probably means that many articles that they have been getting have been "spun". 

What is article spinning?

From what I understand, Spinning articles is the process of using software to rewrite article content quickly mostly through replacing words and phrases with similar words and phrases.  I assume people started to use article spinning software because they saw the writing on the wall with similar updates at Google last year which dropped website rankings for sites that include affiliate datafeeds using content from the datafeed instead of rewritten content and similar cases with unchanged product descriptions and little original text.  I know and I agree. How much can you really say about a product that really is helpful and useful to a visitor to your website?  Unless it is your own product there really is very little you can add that can help the decision to click a product or not, but the search engine doesn't see it that way.  That's also probably why there are so many review and fake review websites today since the BS about products got better ranking even before those changes in the last couple years.

Those very problems made article marketing more popular since people needed more backlinks to get their sites back up in search results and since by nature we are lazy and because we need to compete with the real content farms where there are hundreds of writers writing nonsense (yet original) articles every day, people started using Article Spinning software. 

I have been tempted to try to use them but so far I've only rewritten my articles starting by thinking of the topic and what I wrote before. I make a point of changing the title and while I'll occasionally keep the main points, the text is different.  Often by the second writing of a topic the content is better than the original on my blog or website since I had more time to think about it and I can add any new ideas that come to mind.  

Pros and Cons of article re-writting by hand vs. using an article spinner

The Pros for rewriting by hand and mind is that it is truly your work and it will be just as understandable as your normal writing. It will be original work even if you keep the same main points.  

The cons are the time it takes and the boredom that occurs by having to write the same topic over and over just to get your work seen and to have a backlink on another site.  Article spinning software can let you rewrite an article in a few minutes even if it is still confusing.  I'm sure if you just pasted an article directly from software, it would be almost impossible to understand since we know that most synonyms are not 100% the same and therefore multiple work changes will cause confusion as someone tries to read it.

What is the future of Article marketing?

I almost wonder if article marketing is dying, since it is no longer as easy as reposing your content to other sites as links and the same work will be needed as posting to your own websites. Perhaps people will finally just focus on writing great content for their own web properties and social bookmarking?  I'm sure web 2.0 websites will still be around for people who don't want to have their own website or blog, but I wonder how much value there will be in using them for traffic generation and backlinks after the next few search engine updates.

What do you think?  Do you spin or have you spun your articles? Do you do article marketing today?