Article Spinning

[Badlands]

Has anyone ever been the victim of article spinning? Over the weekend, I discovdered that one of my articles that was published at xxx.GoArticles.com was taken and spun and the result was that it made no sense at all. It appeared that the person would take a certain word like "slot machine" and replace it with, let's say, UseMyWallet.

[brean78]

Were ther links on the spun article to another affiliate site?

Personally I think the practice is highly irritating and I can't see any value in it.

[Badlands]

Brean78 wrote: "Were ther links on the spun article to another affiliate site?"

After I made the post I remembered that I forgot something. The article spinner kept all of my biographical information and inserted her name in place of mine, and then inserted an affiliate link to an online casino in place of my web site.

[Anthony]

Is this site xxxGoArticles.com full of spun articles?

[Badlands]

No, I don't believe that xxxGoArticles.com is full of spun articles. It is regarded by many as a prestigious article directory along with xxxEzineArticles.com and xxxBuzzle.com.

This person apparently took an article of mine off of xxxGoArticles.com, spun it, and inserted it into a blog. The way in which I discovered the spun article is that I subscribe to Google Alerts for "Microgaming slot machines." I received an alert and I checked the alert out, which is something that I don't normally do.

Hope that this helps.

[Pam712]

Unfortunately its a common practice amongst lazy webmasters and often results as you said in an article which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, its to try to manipulate the search engines. There is autoblogging software which does this job automatically - it scrapes content and spins articles - which may be what this person is using as it appear in a blog.

The article directories have very little control over who does this sort of thing

Try reporting the site which your spun article appears to google for copyright infringement- its a long shot but you never know

[Badlands]

Pam wrote:

"There is autoblogging software which does this job automatically - it scrapes content and spins articles - which may be what this person is using as it appear in a blog."

I didn't know that this kind software was around. Thank you for that information.

After the incident, I took another recent article from Buzzle and ran it through a free article spinner. I couldn't believe the results. That version wouldn't have been approved by the Buzzle editors.

Yes, I believe that I will report the site to Google.

So, thanks for all the support everyone.

[patmcluk]

Brean78 wrote: "Were ther links on the spun article to another affiliate site?"

After I made the post I remembered that I forgot something. The article spinner kept all of my biographical information and inserted her name in place of mine, and then inserted an affiliate link to an online casino in place of my web site.

You should also report her to the casino. I bet they would like to know if one of their affiliates is acting like this....

[my3sons]

I know the feeling believe me. I have had one of my highly converting opt in email templates posted on a marketing forum WORD FOR WORD- including my links.

I guess I wouldn't have cared so much if they just used it, but sharing it with the world and encouraging others to use it as a template for their marketing efforts is a little uncalled for in my opinion.

Not only does it hurt my conversions, it hurts everyone because when someone lazy copies it word for word, it just waters it down. I immediately went back to the drawing board and created more messages with unique content. (and they convert better- so it was a blessing in disguise! haha)

Our company has a VERY strict policy about sharing marketing materials with anyone outside the company. If a casino isn't ok with this, we'll run campaigns using their creatives or we will pass doing business with them- it's a deal breaker because it's not fair to our other partners to share any of our content, but we never share our creatives with anyone.

I know this is a little "apples and oranges", but the idea is the same.

It's probably not worth the effort to try and have this removed, I just chalked my experience up to "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"