Just want feedback if I have an RSS feed of my own, will this help or hurt SERP? The articles for the feed are my own original work. Any response is greatly appreciated.
You can submit your feed to yahoo site explorer to aid slurps' indexing. you should consider no indexing/following your RSS feed in order to avoid duplicated content and to avoid your feed appearing in the SERPS. There is no point passing on PR to your RSS feed.
RSS feeds won't help your site get crawled any faster, better, or more thoroughly by the search engine spiders. All they do is syndicate content to readers who want alternative means of accessing your site's content.
Thanks everyone for your feedback. I guess the RSS feed just gives me a little more exposure, and no SERP improvement.
hello you should not think that RSS feeds will not give you exposure in SERP. If you submit these RSS feeds in RSS feeds directories then your site will crawl very fast and U will also get strong back links and naturally If your back links will increase then it will effect in SERP and if your site will crawl fast then your content will also crawl fast and it will defenately effect in SERP.
what if some lame, fed sites use your feed just to put up and steal your content, and a few of them do it, resulting in a bunch of duplicate content around the net personally I completely disable rss feeds from all of my sites
Well it might hurt your SERP if something like what RuffNat stated would happen.. just putting that out there
I see that there a few differences of opinion here. But Dan and Sweetfunny have the most posts and reps so I'll bet they are most correct! On another post of mine Sweetfunny gave me a way to disable the spiders from my RSS feed, but I'm having a hard time thinking that if my feed is the original feed for the content out there, how does Google not count my content as the original? If I hide it, but still have the feed, won't they (the spiders or algorithm) think my site is stealing content. I like the idea of syndicating just to get some exposure and hopefully other people finding my sites interesting therefore linking to it. But if I remove my feed, I no longer have this exposure. I certainly don't want to hurt my SERP, therefore it seems like the feeds might be a catch 22. Any other opinions on this? Pluses or minuses of RSS feeds for SERP and/or site exposure...Thanks
Who has the content first has nothing what so ever to do with who ranks for it, if someone scrapes your feed and their domain/page has more authority you're gone. Not only that, your feed is duplicate on your own site especially if you publish full feeds. I've seen alot of feeds outranking the main webpage version and showing up in the SERP's, because it's text rich and low in bandwidth/page size which Google likes. Having visitors land on your feed from SERP's is bad, it lacks your branding, navigation, visual elements and alot of people just hit the back button (i know i do). Feeds also waste link equity throughout your site that could be better used boosting your main version. Also it wastes crawl budget, Google only allocates a certain amount of resources to your site crawling each day, so by Google crawling your feeds you could be missing out of having your fresh content crawled instead. Also as ruffnat said, having your feed indexed opens you up to scrapers who run inurl queries in Google and grab your content. So really, there's not many positives to indexing your feeds and alot of negatives. Hope this makes sense.
Tried to rep ya again Sweetfunny, but I still haven't spread enough around. Great advice as usual. I'm ranking #11 in Google for my main site that I'm working on http://www.floridabassfishing.us for keywords florida bass fishing. I'm gonna try an experiment and remove the feed in the next couple of days and see what happens (maybe even tonight if I have enough energy). I'll just make my feed pages (the feed is not sitewide, only the Tip of the Week with about 6 pages) regular internal links. Wish me luck, maybe I'll get into the top 10? OK- Just edited my post and removed RSS feed as of 11/20/07 at 10:10 PM. Made a page with my "Tip of the Week Links" to my old feed pages. Feedfbf.xml is now gone! I'll see if anything happens to my SERP either positive or negative (currently #11). I'll continue my website content building and link building (linkbait in forums, etc.). Any feedback on article submissions, good or bad?
come back to this thread in a week and again a week later and let us know how your serp results changed so many of the spam blog splogs are run off of rss feeds nowadays, hopefully google punishes them hard and takes sites that are just unoriginal rss fed sites right out of the indexes.... original content in its original place should be king
Why would they hurt? splogs? Google is smart enough to recognize duplicate content from splogs for the most part. And the whole duplicate content penalty only really starts hitting if hundreds of sites duplicate your content. Not likely. Feeds help readers, well, read. Are you making this site to stop sploggers or to help readers? If you want to help readers and gain readers, get a RSS feed! Focus on what you want for your site not on what you don't want!
Well, my experiment stopped a little short and I reinstated my RSS feed per recommendations from Sweetfunny. I just disallowed the spiders from crawling it. I'll see if I get any bumps in SERP by doing this, and I'm keeping my subscribers happy as well.