Can RSS get you hosed?

Hello Web 1.0

[dataguy]

I have operated a large user-created content site since 2002. The site has pretty much seen a steady increase in traffic since the beginning. Canonical/301 issues were dealt with years ago and I have only ever seen 1 supplemental listing from this site ever, and it was due to a programming error on my part. I have never participated in any link exchanges, people have always liked to link to this site so backlinks have always been naturally occurring. For the past year, when I checked, I have seen that the site would have about 100 backlinks added every day on average (according to Yahoo).

After going to SES this past August I decided that I was behind the times for not offering RSS feeds on this web site, so I added several varieties of RSS feeds. I had always been leary of RSS feeds since my site is scraped all the time and I see snippets of my pages appearing all over the place, and I figured that RSS would just make it easier for people to grab my content.

Within weeks of offering RSS feeds I noticed I was accumulating backlinks at a rate of about 300 per day. Yehaa! But, the party was over after September 15th. For the first time ever, this site had experienced a huge drop in traffic, to about 10% of the norm. I still have about the same number of pages indexed, but what used to rank on page one is no longer to be found. Anecdotally a case could be made that backlinks are being added to this site too rapidly, but this is due to the site offering RSS feeds to its users and not some sort of black-hat SEO scheme. Now when I do a links:domain.com search there are none found. I don't know if this is indicative of my backlinks being nullified, or if the link command is not working like has been happening a lot lately.

Was my site hosed by RSS? Is there anything that I can do about this besides turning the feeds off? I would think that turning the feeds off would be an indicator of unnatural link building. I've been looking over the logs and it is very hard to distinguish anything wrong with any of the user agents grabbing the feeds.

Any suggestions you can offer would be appreciated.