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.
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.