Have been reading around the web that Google is going to ban websites that link to other sites without having useful info themselves. eg aggregator sites... Is this the end of RSS? Does this mean that if you legally display another sites RSS feed you can be penalised? source
It's quite easy to distinguish an RSS feed from a regular site though since RSS feeds always sent the version code along, like "RSS2" or something. edit: So no, I don't think this means the end of RSS feeds
Yeah i agree would google want to ban rss aggregator sites.. what were they talking about then? Are they talking about sites that just rip other sites content off?
but Matt Cutts did pretty much describe RSS sites as the type of sites it's looking to blacklist. eg non original, scraper, low quality etc etc
Don't count on them going anywhere soon. If they have some major breakthrough they might be able to devalue them to some extent, but I'm pretty skeptical.
Right now it is common for sites with duplicate content to rank better than those with the original content. This means google can't always tell who copied from who.
I've seen my french digg like site got penalty on 21st october, it lost 80% of the traffic from google overnight. Strangely enough the english version of the site hasn't been penalized yet, quite the contrary indeed.
Google, or more specifically Matt Cutts didn't say in his blog post that Google was going to ban anyone or any specific type of site. He stated that they have already released an update to a document classifier which will make it harder for spam content to rank highly. Think the blog post pages which are filled with endless repeated junk comments. He also said that they have improved their ability to detect hacked sites (which as a programmer, I find incredible that it has taken them this long to do, as it really is quite easy). What they are evaluating next is the web sites which copy other people's content and have low levels of original content. So pure spammy sites that have nothing but RSS feeds are likely to be hit in the future, but it won't affect those who have a good quality web site and use other people's RSS feeds. Just my interpretation...
This will not be done immediately but sooner or later but still its under observation. This might be a very hard decission for google and RSS is publicly used and every subscriber or blog owner will be disturbed by this decission.
Thank you for making it clear. I have also read official blog of Google and no where they have told that they will ban those sites which are using RSS.
I guess spammers should post an article or post somewhere and announce more advanced content spamming algorithm they will produce in response to google update
He said they're evaluating a way to reduce copied content, but that's really hard. There's no reliable way to tell which copy is the original. Word on the street is the new change has something to do with grammar, which makes sense to me. The easiest way to identify spam content right now is to evaluate the English.
But why would an RSS aggregator be punished when they are merely publishing articles that are from owners that want their content distributed? If you are a website owner and dont want your content being used on other sites why broadcast the content via RSS?