How to guarantee you get credit as the originator of your RSS content

[ZydoSEO]

I'm not sure if this is even an issue or not as I will openly admit I have very little experience w/ RSS. But I am being forced into learning about it and am a bit leary of it. Conceptually, something about making all of my 1500+ growning list of articles immediately available to anyone on the net via RSS bothers me. And I think it has to do with the fact that I believe that under certain situations, I might not get credit in the eyes of the SEs (especially Google) as the originator of my own content.

I am guessing that an easy way for someone to mash-up content from other sites to create a new site would be for them to subscribe to RSS feeds. They could take new articles (manually or via scripts) from other sites made available to them via RSS and re-publish them on their own new site. It would seem much easier and more timely than scouring the web for content and manually scraping the content.

My questions are: What if Google or another SE crawls this new mash-up site first and discovers my article there BEFORE they crawl my site and discover the same article which I happen to have written? Would the other site get credit as the originator since Google first discovered the article on their site? It would seem logical that Google would base 'originator' status on where the content was first discovered. I mean, how else could they do it?

Does everyone just weigh the risk of not getting credit as originator against the rewards of getting backlinks to your own site from hyperlinks that are embedded in the article and accept that the reward (backlinks) out weigh the risks (NOT being considered the originator)?

Or do webmasters actually try to guarantee they get credit as originators of their own content by:

1) not making it available via RSS for X days after it is published on their own site in hopes the X days would have given Google enough time to have crawled the site and found the article?

2) not making it available via RSS until they can find their own article in Google's indexes? or

3) some other method...

Or is this just not an issue at all because I am missing something fundamental about RSS feeds?

[edited by: ZydoSEO at 9:18 pm (utc) on Sep. 10, 2008]

[ZydoSEO]

Hmmm Perhaps I picked the wrong forum for this topic.

[vincevincevince]

I only ever put snippets in RSS feeds - if a reader wants the rest they need to click through to the full article.

[Rosalind]

Absolutely don't put your entire article in the RSS feed. Just put a one or two-line teaser that encourages people to click through.

[ZydoSEO]

Thanks for the response. I inherited these a few months ago and am now digging into how to re-implement them under our new site redesign. The existing feeds send the entire article out in XML. We just decided yesterday that the new feeds would have only the 1st 100 or so words of the article.