A friend of mine's blog has a PR level of something like 3, while his RSS feed has a PR level of 4-5. The odd part is that his RSS feed is actually outlisting him on the SERPS (coming up #1 for it's keyterm), whereas his actual site is ranked much much lower on the SERPs. The even more unusal part is that his RSS feed (hosted on the same server) has absolutely no backlinks (I set up Google's Webmaster tools for the rss feed - since his rss feed resembles http://rss.domain.com and can be tracked as if it were a seperate site). Google reports 0 backlinks to the rss feed from within the webmaster control, nor does it list any backlinks when using the 'linkto' search command. His site has several backlinks, but the rss feed with 0 known or listed backlinks outranks his site (excluding his own site - which of course links to the rss feed). I told him that either way it doesn't matter, since his rss feed still routes back to his own page and he still should get visitors that way. Has this happened to anyone else? I thought there may be something more malicious behind this, such as rss scrapers..
RSS feeds might have domain advantage like if you have RSS feed of Feedburner which is PR 8 and ur site is only PR 1 it could be possible that ur feed is doing better than ur domain..crazy but true.
nope, it's hosted on his own server. His site is a private blog (boring things about his life IMHO) so it's not as if his rss feed is getting syndicated around. @bibel I think Yahoo may be valuing rss feeds over websites, maybe they think it has more credability..but this is on Google, (on yahoo his site comes up before the rss feed - the rss feed is right under his site).