RSS Feeds and Google PageRank

[Jordo needs a drink]

I posted this in the RSS Feeds category, but maybe it should be asked here.

I noticed RSS feeds have Google PageRank (not a webpage displaying the parsed feed, but the actual feed itself). Does this mean they can pass PageRank also?

[Iguana]

They seem to be just normal pages (not supplementals) so I guess they pass pagerank.

[abates]

Since generally they'll be a duplicate of content elsewhere on your site, might it not be better to block Google from indexing them using robots.txt and/or the nofollow attribute value?

[edit] though if it's the feed for a blog or news feed, you may find it then doesn't show up in blogsearch or the news search, which may be a bad thing. :)

[followgreg]

Abates>> what you said is interesting, I would like the opinion of others too - Would it be good to block GG from spidering RSS feeds in order to keep the pagerank value on HTML type of pages?

[Iguana]

Forget 'preserving Pagerank', Google perceiving Duplicate content on your site can kill it in the SERPS. I blocked Googlebot from my rss feeds.

[Gimp]

How did you block google bot from the RSS feed?

[Iguana]

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /rssfeeds/

[BillyS]

>>I blocked Googlebot from my rss feeds.

Ditto.

[trillianjedi]

news search

The Google News bot does not crawl RSS feeds.

Google Search bot does, and you can block it in robots.txt as above.

The duplicate content "penalty" is a myth though - it will not affect your ranking in the SERPS, the duplicate content will simply rank well below the original page (often completely buried). The "original" page will be unaffected.

TJ

[abates]

Thanks, trillianjedi. Not having a news site, I wasn't sure how Google read them. :)

However it does seem from Google's help that blocking googlebot from indexing a feed will remove your blog from blogsearch, so there is that to consider.

[webspy]

But if you block Google from your feeds, what about Google Blogsearch? And the personalized front page, and Gmail, all those use feeds.

[Jordo needs a drink]

I have a hard time believing there would be a dup content penalty for RSS feeds, that's kinda their purpose. Of course, in saying that, I'm giving Google the benefit of a doubt that they thought of this prior to indexing xml feeds and giving xml feeds PageRank.

[Iguana]

I agree a dup content penalty is unlikely - but, in my case, when your Google traffic is down from 10,000 a day to about 100 you will try anything.

[abates]

Another solution, if it is causing problems, could be to reduce the number of items in the RSS feed so that they expire off the bottom more quickly. Assuming that the bots hit your feed daily, setting items so they expire after a few days should allow BlogSearch, Yahoo, etc to index the items while reducing any potential duplicate penalties to only affecting the last few items, and only those for a few days.

Blocking robots altogether will prevent exposure through services like blogsearch and technorati.

[chaaban]

i posted this topic :

About (Google is Sending Traffic to my RSS Feed )

[webmasterworld.com...]

rss feed are getting higher results than the normal post .

if i wanted to block them and i had this structure :

domain/year/month/year/post-name/feed/

would this thing work in the robot.txt?

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /rssfeeds/

Thank's

[Jaid]

The original page is the parent and the rss in this example is the child. Therefore Google should always penalize the rss feed iteself for dupe before the content page.

[chaaban]

i just added rel="nofollow" to the rss feed link

[caveman]

Agree with TJ re dup content WRT duo content appearing on different sites ... but respectfully disagree WRT dup content on same site. Lengthy discussion took place here [webmasterworld.com].

Since then, I also cleaned up a client's site that had this issue and this issue only, and it came back from the depths. Also worked on another client site with this issue, but there were other issues too, so that one wasn't clear evidence. Still, on the first site, not much else changed, so a strong feeling we had had already (as voiced in linked thread above) became even stronger.

Just my 2 cents, and of course, one never knows for sure...

[mrMister]

What MIME-type are you serving it as?

If you're offering a text/html version, I'd scrap that and only offer an application/rss+xml version.

I can't see any need for your site visitors to browse your RSS feed outside of a reader let alone Google.

[classa]

The duplicate content "penalty" is a myth though - it will not affect your ranking in the SERPS, the duplicate content will simply rank well below the original page (often completely buried). The "original" page will be unaffected.

I agree that a duplicate content penalty may not exist with respect to RSS since the whole idea is content "syndication". We have RSS feeds on our site comming from ezinearticles and just yesterday, in our logs, someone found our website and the rss feed on our website doind a query on google. The search query was Creating Sitemaps for Google, MSN, and Yahoo. The original article from ezine was #1, and our page was #3 in the serps. Granted, there were only 619,000 serps, our page was not completely buried. I know it is a no-no to post url's here, but if someone wants to see it just for s and g, send me a pm and I will forward the search query and info.