RSS, Feedster and SEO

Discussion in 'XML & RSS' started by andheresjohnny, May 12, 2006.

  1. #1
    Note: The subject references Feedster ... but I meant to type Feedburner.



    Question 1:

    When people subscribe to a site's RSS feed, does that have any SEO benefit? Are these subscriptons counted as backlinks to the site in any way?


    Question 2:

    If there is some SEO benefit to an RSS feed, would using a 3rd party service like Feedburner kill it? I assume any crawlers or bots would not be able to make the connection between the Feedburner feed and the originating site.


    This is new to me. I understand the benefit of having content containing my links and ads placed in front of people on a daily basis. I'm trying to discover if there are SEO benefits to promoting an RSS feed as well.

    Thank you.
     
    andheresjohnny, May 12, 2006 IP
  2. gemini

    gemini Peon

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    #2
    Q1: It depends. If people subscribed to your feed syndicating your content on their sites - you might have links pointing to your site. Of course if they are not using any nofollow attributes. But if they just using rss aggregators to read your posts - then probably no.

    Q2: That is a good question. I asked about it before, but really haven't found a definite answer. I'm using Feedburner and I noticed on one of my brand new blogs (4 mo old) the actual feedburner page is ranking pretty high for quite competitive keywords/phrases with my content on it and links to the original posts - so it does benefit with immediate natural traffic. Also my own pages started to rank for less competitive keyphrases... with only a couple of inbound links and feedburner feed this blog gets over 300 uniques per day only after 4 months of posting. So, I guess it is beneficial.

    I also would like to hear some thoughts from others on the second question.
     
    gemini, May 12, 2006 IP