Article spinning

[Kerrib4]

Hi

I have started using power article rewriter but I can't seem to get good uniqueness percentages. The way I have been writing it is; 3 sentences per sentence, changing phrases, changing alot of words two or three times. With doing this I am only getting 23-30%. Has anyone got any experience using this programme.

Here, for example, is one sentence from my article:

The original:

"Baby travel seat and toddler travel seat covers are one of the things that people tend not to think about."

The rewritten sentence:

{{{Baby|Infant} travel seat|{Baby|Infant} car seat|{Baby|Infant} safety seat} and {{toddler|tot} travel seat|{toddler|tot} safety seat|{toddler|tot} car seat|{toddler|tot} booster seat} covers are {one|1} of {the|many} {things|items} that {people|individuals} {tend not|don't tend} to {think about|consider|think of}.|{Most|Many} {people|individuals} {don't tend|tend not} to {think about|consider using} covers for {{baby|infant} travel seats|{baby|infant} safety seats|{baby|infant} car seats} and {{toddler|tot} travel seats|{toddler|tot} car seats|{toddler|tot} safety seats}.|One of {the|many} {things|items} {people|individuals} {don't tend|tend not} to {think about|consider using|think of} is {car seat covers for|covers for car seats, but ones for} {{child|kid} car seats|{child|kid} travel seats|{child|kid} safety seats}.}

Could you please let me know if I am doing this right as I am getting low percentages. Does anyone know of any sites where I can compare two articles?

Thanks,
Kerri

[CS-Cart]

You may simply test several programs and compare results, use "article rewriter" in Google to find a decent one. At the same time, I'd personally make a manual rewrite or put efforts into different articles, since this would provide more real interest from readers.

[edmondscommerce]

SEO experts - does this kind of article spinning have any actual value??

I could easily knock something together to fully automate this but I would have thought big G can see right through it.

[CS-Cart]

I'm sure it sees - at least to some extent. Besides, what value does such an approach actually provide? Isn't it better to make a new one, or even a series?

[Stampy]

I'm interested as to how Google would pick up that an article has been spun?

Surely all it sees is the finished article, and it then assesses it to see how unique it is. It wouldn't know that the article had been spun.

[edmondscommerce]

know when google recommends something else that you might be trying to search for...?

its damn clever -

Swapping out synonyms is easy. Like I said I could fully automate this if I wanted, but I'm not convinced it has any real value.

[fisicx]

I used to think google was clever and could spot this but a few threads here and on other forum made me realise that the algo maybe isn't all that sophisitcated.

However... If were to read these articles then I'd likely lose interest rapidly meaning you would lose me as a potential customer. As suggested unless this is a major exercise to build traffic from article sites (needing hundreds of articles) then you are always better off writng it yourself instead of using the automated tools.

Build sites for people not search engines (I ought to add this to my signature).

[Stampy]

know when google recommends something else that you might be trying to search for...?

its damn clever -

Swapping out synonyms is easy. Like I said I could fully automate this if I wanted, but I'm not convinced it has any real value.

There's a difference though between smart searching and spun articles.

In theory, every article on the web is "spun" - there's only a limited amount of vocabulary, and combinations of words. Spinning an article is just a different method of rewriting an article to generate unique content. All google sees is an article, and decides it's merits based on uniqueness, content etc. Whether it has been spun, rewritten or written from scratch isn't relevant is is?

[david64]

If the output of your spun article is truly atrocious it is possible that it could be spotted by Google as garbage. Google do have some ability to spot complete nonsense and web garbage, but as fisicx points out it isn't that great.

As for the uniqueness of your articles. If you really want good uniqueness, you will need to create multiple sentences to, switch paragraphs, add + remove paragraphs and use more word substitutions. However, links from article directories are so poor that I wouldn't really bother going over the top with this. Because the web pages your articles will reside on are so backwater I doubt search engines are going to put much effort into giving the pages a good analysis. I heard that G doesn't do so much processing on supplemental pages and all your articles are likely to be in the supplemental index.

[Stampy]

It depends what you're using the articles for - they don't have to be for third rate article directories. They could be for your own site / blog, content for Squidoo, or on of the better quality directories (eg EZA) where your article may get picked up and used elsewhere (with your links intact).

Agree this isn't going to work if your spun article isn't readable, or just sounds rubbish. I was just pointing out that as clever is Google is, it won't be able to detect a spun article. It would recognise duplicate content if the uniqueness wasn't very high.

To answer the OP, you could use Copyscape to help determine if it is going to get picked up as duplicate content or not. There is a free or paid for version you can use (the paid for version you just buy credits, so it doesn't have to be expensive). You just paste your spun article in.

DupefreePro is the best way to go if you want to directly compare uniqueness between articles.

[Place of design]

Rather than produce gibberish from existing or new articles, add to the web's wealth of excellence and write plenty of good articles

There is a line with SEO that ought not to be crossed - Adding content for SEO's sake

If you write good rellevant content - for humans, and apply intelegent SEO to that article (H1, keywords, titles, descriptions, image descriptions etc) then the seach engines will list the article well. Better still Humans may read the article, and actually take notice of it

The web is for humans. Search engines are just a link in the chain, and ought not to drive the need for content

[edmondscommerce]

ok cool

might have a go at putting together an article spinner and see what happens.

[PrettyPaws]

It really does depend what the purpose of the article is through doesn't it? What advantage does "spinning" have over just submitting 1 well writen article?

[Stampy]

ok cool

might have a go at putting together an article spinner and see what happens.

There's quite a few out there already, free and paid for (not suggesting you don't put one together, just thought you might want to take a look, so you're not reinventing the wheel). AndyBlack, a forum member, has developed something along those lines I think. Power Article Rewriter is another, there's ContentBoss and plenty more.

I use a simple application called Article Samuraii to convert some PLR articles into content for some blogs I've got. I have to proof read it because it substitues synonyms, but it only takes me five minutes and the articles are good quality.

The other way the spinners work is the way that the OP has described, with the user suggesting synonyms inside those curly brackets, and the application substituting those.

I does depend on what you're using it for, and I agree that nothing beats quality, original content.

[Kerrib4]

Thanks for all the replies. It's mainly for blogs and for my actual website. The article spinner actually took me a good few hours and I did think that maybe I am better just writing them one by one myself rather than spinning existing articles. It's just the time it takes to write each one that I was thinking about. Does anyone have any tips on other ways for SEO?...Other than keywords. Or even if anyone can advise the best way to use my keywords? Any advice would be great as I am new to all of this and really need to get the site to be noticed asap. Thanks everybody :)

[Kerrib4]

Just thought I would also say, I have just downloaded Dupefreepro and I have compared my articles. The ones I compared are 28% duplicate. This is better than I though which is good. Could somebody who also uses dupefreepro let me know if those percentages are good or not?

Thanks

[PrettyPaws]

At the end of the day this is just the latest way to con the search engines. What's so bad about duplicate content anyway to make people go to such lengths? Sure only one insance of your article will show in the serch results, so what? Your links from others still count and the human readers of the one real article might just find it useful, they might even buy something from you! I read "spun " articles and just run a mile, it destroys the authors credability in my eyes

[Kerrib4]

Hi, can anyone tell me if 28% duplicate is good when comparing two articles? I have downloaded Dupefreepro and that is the percentage it gave me. Is that percentage good? What is the percentage range it should be in? I don't want to try spinning any articles until I am sure of this.

Oh and I am only going to use my spun articles for blogs etc.

[Stampy]

I think if you're trying to avoid the duplicate content thing, you need to be looking at over 40% unique, ideally over 60%.

With article spinning, I found it easier to rewrite each sentence twice, rather than every other word. This gave me a higher uniqueness.

[Kerrib4]

Hi Stampy,

I meant the duplicate percentage with Dupefreepro. So basically my articles were 28% the same if you know what I mean. I guess this would mean 72% unique?

As for the article rewriter by sebastian kohl - I was rewriting each sentence twice, rewriting phrases and also rewriting words. This is why I really don't understand how I have been getting percentages lower than 40% uniqueness. Especially when Dupefreepro is telling me that my articles are only 28% alike. I jut dont want to start spinning more articles until I know it is worthwhile.

Thanks for your help.

[fisicx]

So what you are trying to do is create lots of similar articles so help your ranking. They certainly won't be of much use to your visitors because we are brighter then search engines and can spot the similarities in style and stricture.

If you are unable to write unique, informative and interesting posts that add value to your visitor then don't have a blog. 99% of all blogs are only created as a marketing tool and there are millions of people doing exactly the same as you. The end result is a search engine index stuffed full of self promoting posts. In fact the argument goes even further by suggesting that social media/networking has become so successful that it has degraded the quality of information - everybody copies everybody else and little new is created.

Not suggesting the collapse of the web2 thing, it's just that there so much information that there isn't enough hours in the day to keep up anymore.

[Kerrib4]

I am going to put the similar articles on blog websites, not my own websites blog. Do you not use any spinning softwares? A lot of my own written articles will be similar anyway because there is only so much you can write about one type of thing.

The articles on my own website will contain good keywords, while the ones on blog sites are mainly for links. Is this the right way to do it?

I basically just want to make sure more people are looking at my website, and I thought spinning articles may make it easier for me in terms of how much quicker it is.

Thanks,
Kerri

[fisicx]

But if you are posting on free for all blogs then they get swamped with people doing exactly what you are doing. You are trying to attract people to your site rather than creating something they want to read. Do some testing, post some articles and see how many people visit. My best estimate will be zero. and the links themselves won't have any value since the SE will recognise the blogs as being a dumping ground for marketeers (and spammers).

If you are getting visitors to your site, concentrate on keeping them happy (and converting) as this will make you money.

And no I don't use any spinning software, I prefer to write useful and unique content. Gets me loads of visitors and lots of business.

[Kerrib4]

So if your writing quality articles and putting them on blog sites to attract visitors, then are you still adding links to your article to get them onto your site?

What advice can you give for getting more visitors onto my site?

Thanks again

[PrettyPaws]

So if your writing quality articles and putting them on blog sites to attract visitors, then are you still adding links to your article to get them onto your site?

What advice can you give for getting more visitors onto my site?

Thanks again

Stop trying to cheat using these sort of spammy techniques. Build your sites and articles for humans, not to trick the search engines.

That would be my advice.

[LBtrading]

If you spin articles manually then the quality of the spun articles depends on what you put in, To be honest if you do it correcty then the article will be perfectly ok,

now I use spinning quite alot and can say that you should not be putting spun articles on your site, if you using this strategy then change it so that:

write an original article that fits your purpose of the site ie for conversions to sales or to lead the visitor somewhere or whatever, once you have this doen take that article and spin it including the title, then blast these to article sites or UAW with links back to your original article or other pages on your site.

For anyone that says the artciles are rubbish and people wont be able to read them then I can personally say this isnt true for manual spinning, anyone who has submitted articles to ezine will know they manually approve articles and are fussy about what ones they approve ie bad spelling and nonsense articles will get rejected and I have submitted loads of spun versions of articles to ezine with no rejections.

I have posted on this forum a few times about article spinning as well as a simple and basic walkthrough of a technique you can use, just check through some of my posts.

[sussexrob]

Saying spinning does not work is fair enough as many people believe it doesn't but just as many believe it does but it depends how you do it

If you use software to automatically take your article and change it around, add lines, change words then yes it will look and read terrible

If you use software that shows your your sentance and asks you to rewrite it then the context and related rewrite is usually very close so very readable in the whole article

there are many marketers in affiliate marketing who swear on spinning but again there are others who would say in that time you have rewritten the article from scratch to catch 22

Either way, spinning does work so to say it does not false stop, is false itself but it depends how you do it.

In my niche many of the top websites have a link from many other sites resources pages which are also next to useless as many are recipricol so again article directories and resource pages are more or less equal

build a site with decent content and a few good links and you will flourish. Its been proven that adding a page a day to your site shows google you are more relevant that others so you automatically rank higher, works for me to and traffic goes up a few days later once google has seen i have fresh content

Spin the articles if thats how you want to market but make sure its you rewriting them and not just taking text randomly taken from the net as some spinning software does

Rob

[Subbynet]

I do much the same for product descriptions from affiliate feeds.

I've tried many "automated" solutions, with success only coming from just one method really. (For obvious reasons I'm not going to spell it out, but if I thought of it, others will too, and no doubt some are using it already)

The automatic synonym replacement tools were next to useless really, I would steer clear of these, and the ones whereby you can choose automatic replacements can take too long to set up if you have large amounts of text which needs changing (aka, Product Descriptions from feeds)... Even then the results are questionable IMO.

Anyways, my "super doper secret method" ;) works pretty well, I'd call it semi-automatic rather than automatic, I quickly read it before pressing OK and then it does the next one, bad ones are flagged for manual intervention afterwards...

I've managed this using AutoIT (http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/), which enables me to grab text from a database and then manipulate it with existing desktop applications and also web services. I would say its readable 90% of the time without modification, and with a quite low duplicate level, say 30%... This tends to get better with longer descriptions, but nonetheless fine for my needs.

Now the manual part, because even at 90% readability, if you had 1000 peices of text to process, thats 100 descriptions which would end in jibberish.. So these I ran though an application called WordFlood (http://www.wordflood.com/), which is a manual synonym replacement tool. I can't say I've tried many of these apps, because WoodFlood was the first one I purchased and I've found it very simple to use.

So if I was to give any advice in these threads, its to go "semi-automatic", and use an application like Autoit to save your sanity from the repetition (Time is money :) ) which is article/description rewriting.

[Place of design]

I fail to see the point of producing diluted crap from what may have been a genuinley good article in the first place. As others have mentioned - Humans wil lbe the final judge

WHAT IS THE POINT OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING?

If it is a marketing technique, then any said human, who reads the gibberish, will think you just cant write, and ignore you anyway

Stop trying to cut corners, and play the system, commit the time and effort to writing good genuine content, or dont bother at all

The people who produce remarkable content, have visitors read and re-read thier work day in and day out without having to resort to spewing out varients all over the place

It all comes down to £££ money, and what ever it is you are trying to promote wont benefit from this appraoch long term. You just have to accept that the interne doesnt owe you a living, and that genuine real human users see straight through this approach

[BigJunkTruck]

The only time I would ever use article spinning was with Splogs and that was the best part of 2 years ago. The best way to get traffic to your site is produce good quality material and invest in some smart offsite seo

I would also say that any "off the shelf" seo software you can buy is usless after a few months as the bigger search engines can easily map the "footprints" left by these tools.

[LBtrading]

The whole point of spinning content is mainly for backlinks not direct traffic, also with manual article spinning the content will make sense so if people do land on that article they might follow your links and you get traffic as a bonus.

Every one bangs on about about relevent quality links but never says what they do to get these, they normally will go on threads like this and say: "build quality content then point some high quality links at it and job done" well how do you suppose you get those high quality links because not that many people are going to give you an in-context editorial link, so you can do things like create and article spin it into 20 unique articles, then if your cheap post it to places like wordpress blogspot squidoo etc find 20 sites. then take the links to each of those posts and build a few not so quality links to them ie bookmarks directories blog comments. This will get them indexed and will give a little juice.

and there you have 20 relevent editorial dofollow links to your site with anchor text, rince and repeat untill ranked. now there are more complex linking structures and more complex techniques if you are going after super competitive words.

and before people come here say google doesnt like this as its manipulating the rankings etc well all active link building is manipulating the rankings and it also stands that this works full stop and you will not get banned or penalized if you could get banned for this then you would simply create these and point them at your competitors???

any way the whole purpose is for the link value and what I said above will be worth more than submitting them to article directories.

[sussexrob]

The whole point of spinning content is mainly for backlinks not direct traffic, also with manual article spinning the content will make sense so if people do land on that article they might follow your links and you get traffic as a bonus.

Every one bangs on about about relevent quality links but never says what they do to get these, they normally will go on threads like this and say: "build quality content then point some high quality links at it and job done" well how do you suppose you get those high quality links because not that many people are going to give you an in-context editorial link, so you can do things like create and article spin it into 20 unique articles, then if your cheap post it to places like wordpress blogspot squidoo etc find 20 sites. then take the links to each of those posts and build a few not so quality links to them ie bookmarks directories blog comments. This will get them indexed and will give a little juice.

and there you have 20 relevent editorial dofollow links to your site with anchor text, rince and repeat untill ranked. now there are more complex linking structures and more complex techniques if you are going after super competitive words.

and before people come here say google doesnt like this as its manipulating the rankings etc well all active link building is manipulating the rankings and it also stands that this works full stop and you will not get banned or penalized if you could get banned for this then you would simply create these and point them at your competitors???

any way the whole purpose is for the link value and what I said above will be worth more than submitting them to article directories.

I totally agree!

[Place of design]

and before people come here say google doesnt like this as its manipulating the rankings etc well all active link building is manipulating the rankings

any way the whole purpose is for the link value and what I said above will be worth more than submitting them to article directories.

No it isnt, Some active link building is built on total relevance... that is relevance to the 2 unique page contents, relevance to the 2 businesses ; individuals / organisations involved and relevance to the person browsing

Example florist links to wedding planner, wedding planner links to photographer.. photographer links to artist, artist links to jewelry maker.. etc.. This type of link building is the internet equivelent to networking

All these links are real, add real value to the internet experinece, are relevant and are not filling the internet up with crap

The difference is, they are built up with real hard work, with real businesses forging real relationships with real people. These links are 1000 x more valuable, because they are often also backed up in real life with a proper recommendation from a real person too

What you are espousing is creating lots of barley relevant adverts (or spun articles) and spewing them all over the internet to anywhere that will let you post them. What you fail to understand that real people are not the same as search engines, and see straight through this approach. If your tatget site (the one you are pimping) hasnt got enough quality to stand up on its own, the visitors may come, and will soon go

If we project your approach to real life, doing anything will be a nightmare... you want a meal, you walk down the road You follow one of the thousands of signs for the resturant, and end up at a takeaway, which is closed, by the time you found the resturant you wanted, it would be full of people that really wanted a beer

Why not just put all your effort into creating a website that is worth visiting, that has such excelent content, people actually come back, and even recommend thier friends to. An website with such excellent content, other webmasters will want to link to you

[LBtrading]

No it isnt, Some active link building is built on total relevance... that is relevance to the 2 unique page contents, relevance to the 2 businesses ; individuals / organisations involved and relevance to the person browsing

Example florist links to wedding planner, wedding planner links to photographer.. photographer links to artist, artist links to jewelry maker.. etc.. This type of link building is the internet equivelent to networking

All these links are real, add real value to the internet experinece, are relevant and are not filling the internet up with crap

The difference is, they are built up with real hard work, with real businesses forging real relationships with real people. These links are 1000 x more valuable, because they are often also backed up in real life with a proper recommendation from a real person too

What you are espousing is creating lots of barley relevant adverts (or spun articles) and spewing them all over the internet to anywhere that will let you post them. What you fail to understand that real people are not the same as search engines, and see straight through this approach. If your tatget site (the one you are pimping) hasnt got enough quality to stand up on its own, the visitors may come, and will soon go

If we project your approach to real life, doing anything will be a nightmare... you want a meal, you walk down the road You follow one of the thousands of signs for the resturant, and end up at a takeaway, which is closed, by the time you found the resturant you wanted, it would be full of people that really wanted a beer

Why not just put all your effort into creating a website that is worth visiting, that has such excelent content, people actually come back, and even recommend thier friends to. An website with such excellent content, other webmasters will want to link to you


I dont think you understand the objetive, the spun articles are not adverts they are not there for your customers they are there for backlinks, these backlinks will help get yoyr website to the top of the search engines so that customers searching for your products or services will find you.

I do put effort into creating a relevent and useful website it is then that you need to get your website infront f your customers, now what you deem as relevant isnt what google and other search engines deem as relevant. If your website sells flowers and you create an article on flowers with links pointing back to your flower site, then google will deem the link as relevant. and from what you are discussing google has no way of telling if you have been out all day networking to get other sites link to you.

As far as the quality being 1000 more than my links how do you justify this, why or how would the search engines calulate your "networking links" be of better quality than my links, the point is they cant. Google dont know if the article on the blogs was put there by me or by one of my "networking friends"

[Place of design]

I dont think you understand the objetive
I certainly do

why or how would the search engines calulate your "networking links" be of better quality than my links, the point is they cant. Google dont know if the article on the blogs was put there by me or by one of my "networking friends"
It (google) doesn't need to. The human, on the originating website will look at the link, and view and judge it for what it is. If it is a link that is totally relevant, well thought out. It will get clicked on

Example (personal one for one of my businesses)
A bride has just chosen a venue. On the venues website there is a link to my wedding photography website. That link is there because I went there, they like the way I work, I shot a photo for thier brochure, I know them, I built up a genuine raport. The link mirrors a real human link

That trading relationshiop, and the link is worth gold to me. If the bride doesnt ask the venue about a photographer, she will see the link on the website when she gets home and check me out. About 80% of the time, when that happens, I get a phone call, and about 60% of the time i convert the call into a booking for over £1000

That is a very extreeme example of a single link working marvels. I have many such links with many such venues, wedding planners, and the like. I achieve them with hard work

I would rather have 1 visitor that books, than 100's or 1000's who just look

The real issue here is visitor relevance. Good well thought out links garuntee visitor relevance. Lots of almost random links, do 3 things

1. get you lots of irrelevant trafic
2. increase your page rank, which is percieved as good
3. leave a footprint of orphaned articles behind, which in the long term could be bad

[LBtrading]

I think you are talking about two different purposes, what I mean is the whole point of these backlinks is to get higher in google for certain keywords so your traffic can be as targetted or as untargetted as you desire. You control anchor text so you can build links to rank for some highly targetted and converting traffic.

What you are talking about is in essence an advert( via a link) on a site related to your niche these are two different tactics for different purposes.

what I was talking about was using spun content to improve your search engine rankings for keywords that you desire.

[Place of design]

Actually wedding photography is far from a Niche. There are plenty of photographers taking your approach... There are also plenty blowing a fortune on adwords, PPC etc, there are plenty paying 20,30 £50 to be listed on a directory. there are plenty with cloaked pahes, hidden text and the like.. The market is totally oversaturated with photographers and sites

I am not trying to make a battle out of this subject. I do understand what you are saying, and see your point, but I dont agree it is a good thing to do, the long term legacy could outweigh the short term giain in page rank. The process would need to be almost continuious, as posts and articles get depreciated, domains expire / get blacklisted, or webmasters wise up and add no-follow to their sites.

Most of the time a site owner can gain a lot more by looking at the conversion of the site. Techniquies like taking a single product, or range of products, re-branding them, or strengthening the brand, and then creeating a microsite for them and them.. repeating the process as required to create a cluster of micro sites, that then feed into the main store can do marvels for both conversion and ease of marketing. This is not a black hat technique - it is good old fashioned marketing. Take a company that sells sports goods - Nike - they have lots of products - cloths, trainers, raquets, watches etc.. they take 1 item (like a specific trainer) and push that. Result they sell lots of that trainer, but then the knock on is that rest of the brand benefits

The approch I am talking about takes 1 product or service and targeting it at a specific group. Because the site is very simple, The conversion is high - the user essentially isnt wading through the rest of the products, and the marketing brings a precise group of users. This method makes marketing easier and stronger, because it can be less diluted than the the main site. The main site benefits because the microsite can feed customers precicley into the right part of it

Example: Chevron (nothing to do with me)
Main site: http://www.chevron.com/ with rebranding on http://www.chevron.com/products/BCA/
http://www.chevroncars.com/ - microosite
http://willyoujoinus.com/ - microsite

Example (nothing to do with me)
http://www.mortgage.com/ - microsite
http://www.citi.com/domain/home.htm (http://www.citi.com/) - main site

Example (nothing to do with me)
http://www.greensforlife.co.uk/index.html - microsite
http://www.aggressivehealthshop.co.uk/ - mainsite

The pont here is that they take a single (or group of products) - all be it in a niche or main stream sector. Create a narrow site, focused on it. market that site in its own rights, and then feed the mainsite with it. This increases sales, increases page rank, and makes life easier for customers

Out of interest.. Do you have an example of where you have achcheved such a fine control / uncontrol of a google search result, based on aiming spun articles at a narrrow serch phrase or keyword?

[edmondscommerce]

do this with magento really quite easily :)

[Place of design]

do this with magento really quite easily :)
I know, it is a very well thought out package in a lot of respects

[OldWelshGuy]

If an article is well written and spun properly, then why shouldn't the visitor click through the link to the main site?

I think that what happens often in discussions like this one is that some take up polarised visions of what the other person is talking about, and argues based on that false assumption.

Someone searches for information about a subject, reads a real good article, clicks on the link, and lands on a real good site. What is wrong with that?

Articles are spun to avoid being filtered out. is anyone going to argue that :-

Many people believe that spinning articles is not a good idea
Some people feel that the spinning of an article is not an ideal practice
people often state that article spinning is a far from ideal method

So which of the above is spam? Which is good information? The truth is that the human visitor will only ever see one version, and if that version reads well and answers their need at that point in time, then there is a chacne they will click through. regardsless of that, there is more than a chance that the version will be spidered and the links will count, and those links will push the main site up the rankings anyhow. resulting in the searcher finding the main site as first point of contact.

It certainly isn't an either or however. A good campaign will work on reciprocal within industry/locale etc, as well as link building for ranking.