Hey all, I just wondered something, I have a relativly successful website I run and I recently added RSS feeds for my forum so people can stay up to date with forum posts via the RSS feed but my question is does it help search engine optimization at all if the RSS feeds are cached?
Cached or not - to Google there is no difference. The main thing is that they are updated. Actually SEO does not depend on RSS.
2 things that may happen. 1) Not sure where you've embedded your RSS feed, is it actually showing up as a news feed, or do you just have a button saying "sign up to our RSS feed"? If it's actually being displayed, say on your homepage, it means your homepage will have fresh content on it more often. You'll probably see Google crawling your site more often. This in itself though is not really useful for getting higher rankings, it just means any new content created will be indexed faster. 2) If other people start embedding the RSS feed on their own site and the feed always includes a link back to your website. Well then, you get some free links. Once more if you submit your feed to some feed aggregators your feed will be used more often in this way.