Hi Friends, I would like to use "RSS feed" actively on one of my sites. But I am worried that won't Google penalize the site for duplicate content??? I don't understand this concept - one side every site encourages people to use RSS feed but on the other side, it seems to me search engines like Google will index these pages as duplicate content and penalize the site. Your expert opinion would be highly appreciated. Thanks
I suggest you block search bots from crawling the rss feeds via robots.txt. Mattcutts have also stated some where in his blog that we should use robots.txt file to block google bot from indexing rss feeds.
Thanks Guys, What's the point of blocking Google because the whole reason of using these RSS feeds for me is to create automatic threads fast in my forums and then these posts gets indexed during searches by google and other search engines. Most of you guys say, Google recognizes RSS feed but nobody said how??? So you mean if I there is a RSS feed like this: [title] [2-4 lines content] [link to original article] But for my usage, I do not use the third part i.e. link, I only use the top two i.e. [title] [2-4 lines content] So, will google still recognize that it's a RSS feed???? Your help would be appreciated. Thanks
THERE IS NO DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY!!!!! For the love of God, just fucking forget about this issue. Block the RSS feed with your robots.txt and you're FINE.