November 02, 2012

RSS Feeds and SEO

Be careful with RSS Feeds, for example WordPress and BlogSpot by default add the entire article to the RSS Feed making it easy for anyone to automatically copy your content (autoblog).

If your articles are copied verbatim via RSS Feeds your content could appear to be duplicate content. Basically the moment your articles go live they are available to copy via your RSS Feed, your new content could be indexed in Google on an autoblog before Google indexes your site!

When setting up BlogSpot, WordPress and similar CMS (Content Management Systems) set the RSS Feed to show an excerpt of the posts.

Some blogging systems like WordPress have plugins that can add additional information to your RSS Feeds, for example a WordPress Plugin called CopyFeed (©Feed) that can be used to add links within your RSS Feeds. When your RSS Feed is copied links are added back to your content : example CopyFeed RSS Feed https://stallion-theme.co.uk/feed.

You can't stop your content from being copied, but you can benefit from it.