Is Article Spinning Safe

[dsellers]

I was checking into some different programs that seem to do a good job of mixing up paragraphs to create new articles for submitting to multiple article directories, etc. I'm new to this area. Is this a safe SEO practice. If I have have different variations of the same article on many different sites, is there a risk of being penalized or having my site removed from Google, Yahoo, and the other se? Thanks for any advice.

[Duncan Pollock]

What you're (thinking of becoming) involved in is usually seen as plagiarism, which isn't quite the same as copyright infringement but will raise enough eyebrows in the publishing field (which, in effect, includes the World Wide Web).
You're safe to rephrase an idea/topic in your own words, but even then, although you probably won't attract a penalty from Google et al, you may not earn a high SERP position if an earlier author has already been crawled and included in the search engines' indexes.
On the whole, the key to placement is original content. Simply borrowing from others isn't going to get you the brownie points you're hoping for.

Duncan

[dharrison]

Hi dsellers

I have spent most of today writing an article of a topic that I know little about and although what you suggest sounds very appealing with regard to knowledge and timescale, its just not worth the risk.

You might trick the search engines but you cannot trick the people who read the actual articles and as Duncan has said it is copyright infringement. The last thing you want is to feel an angry authors wrath, especially if they are in the same industry!

As a compromise, think of what you want to write your article about and use the internet as a research tool. if you must quote an article, then be sure to link back to the resource you are quoting. for example:

Statistics as reported by XYZ.com's survey taken in May 2008 shows that 35% of married couples prefer to wait until October for ..... etc.

And yes use your own words. Who knows maybe you can write it better than the other article writers out there.