I have noticed that I am starting to have a number of bots related to Rss Feed sites (Google Feed, Feedster, YahooFeed etc.) Currently I have the RSS feeds blocked in my Robots.txt to stop content duplication problems / penalties. I assume this would be causing the Feed bots to not be able to crawl my feeds? Should I allow these directories to be crawled - and if so could I face duplicate content issues?
I allow them. it's not really content duplication and I wouldn't concern yourself about it. the whole point of RSS is that provides a summary of existing content and by its very nature will therefore duplicate some but i wouldn't expect all your content. Anyway, if google hasn't considered this I'd be VERY surprised
If you don't want your RSS to be crawled, don't include in your site the reference to the feed or XML. Example, remove this kind of lines from your .html: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your feed title" href="./your_feed_file.xml"> Code (markup): That way the bots won't try to download (because they don't know the existence of that feed).
It's no problem getting them crawled, but the problem arises when your RSS feed gets higher position then your website. If you are running a blog, I would recommend to block comment RSS feed.