Can having an RSS feed of my site or blog hurt its ranking due to duplicate content? If I have 10 widgets which I write unique descriptions for then I have an RSS feed with those 10 widgets and descriptions in it won't this de-value the uniqueness of my descriptions? Which will in turn hurt my ranking?
You can change your feed in many ways, best to do is to only have title and the first sentence of the description/text..... Well perhaps not just the first sentence in all cases but you get my point here
What about using the same titles? Isn't this going to take away from the uniqueness? What are other sites doing?
You don't need to change any of the content and you won't get a penalty. Google will simply filter the RSS feed so it doesn't rank in the serps. Think about how many pages have pdf or printer friendly versions. Google knows people don't want to see these in the serps so they are just filtered out. This is how the 'dup content penalty' works - it just filters things from the results.
Because other sites might use it to add fresh content to their site and this generates links back to your site. Also if it gets picked up by peoples news readers you get traffic.
A search for the keyword "Anahita Saxena" shows my site on page 2, rank 11, but thats from the rss feed of the site , that is currently on top for the same keyword. What do you have to say now?
If you had a website, would it be recommended to put an RSS feed from Google News of your keyword? I see a lot of "made for adsense" websites doing this. Or let's phrase this differently, if you had the choice of putting an RSS feed on your website, would it help because of the fresh content?
IMO,its more beneficial, if you use RSS as a means to make your visitors stick to your site rather than for search engines, sooner or later search engines will overcome this rss trend, but if you go the other way you'll gain many happy visitors.