If other websites implement our RSS feed sidewide on there website, can that hurt our own website?
-
Think about the switching anchors from the backlinks and the 100s of sidewide inlinks... I gues Google will understand that it's just a RSS feed right?
-
I am more of a layperson, and joined this site to research certain topics.
I wrote a blog post on the topic of RSS feed scraping and content theft .. which if I understand it was not exactly the OP question.
Having read the other answers here, however, I am actually wondering if my blog post is inaccurate ... or incomplete, and needs correction.
Are you all saying that there is no harm in your RSS feed being scraped, and it might actually be helpful due to the backlinks you might get? Or are you saying that Google ignores those links as it is clear they come from an RSS feed?
Or, am I misunderstanding your point entirely?
THanks for clarifyingl Here is the post if anyone wants to scan it and respond.
Thanks
PS if I have misunderstood the protocol, and am not to piggyback on someone elses topic, or add a link, please advise. My first foray into this forum
-
Hi David,
Thanks for the clear explenation!
The ownership implementation is a logical but good idea! Dit didn't crossed my mind until now
-
I do need to give recognition to David's answer below. For while most of the time you don't need to worry about RSS links, I've heard of webmasters who've been stung by this. It seems likely to hit lower authority sites harder.
If it is a concern, at least you have the power to do something about it.
1. Always place a rel canonical on every page, with an absolute URL (full path) This way if the scrapers take the whole page, the canonical link pointing to yourself might stay in tact.
2. If you suspect over-optimization filters you can de-optimize your anchor text, or add greater variety.
3. In extreme cases you can file a DMCA takedown request of your copywrited content, but at volume this solution doesn't scale, and is a messy business regardless.\
Regardless, these are for the minority of cases. Most of the time you shouldn't have to worry about it.
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for your reply! As I thought Google wil understand it and ignore RSS generated links.
Above I explained my question, beceause I gues I was a little bit to short...I just copy-paste the addition from above:
I don't mean that I put 100s of link in the RSS feed but, when our RSS feed is shown on an other website, we receive backlinks from that website (through the RSS feed) with switchin anchors. In addition is 9 of the 10 times the RSS feed implemented in the sidebar, so sidewide links. The question is if this situation can hurt the website?..Did this clear my question?
But your answer is clear... Google will understand and ignore just as I expected.
So we don't have to worry about this issue I guesss...
-
Hi David, thanks for your insights...
Maybe I didn't wrote down the second answer as clear as possible..."I am not sure exactly what the question is in the second part. Are you asking if you should put hundreds of site-wide links in your RSS Feed? Either way, here is good measure to take"
I don't mean that I put 100s of link in the RSS feed but, when our RSS feed is shown on an other website, we receive backlinks from that website (through the RSS feed) with switchin anchors. In addition is 9 of the 10 times the RSS feed implemented in the sidebar, so sidewide links. The question is if this situation can hurt the website?..Did this clear my question?
-
Normally, I would bow out as I must be mistaken to any of the SEO Staff at SEOmoz as each of them have forgotten more than I will know. However, I have spent a lot of time on this issue, I learned jQuery for the reason of combating this. I am 100% certain, at least for how it was between June 2012 and Feb. 2013.
I realize that Google has stated they can tell the difference but, Google has a policy of misinformation as part of it's strategy to protect search integrity. I give misinformation it's due credit, it ended the cold war, but it also means you cannot trust anything Google says until it is proven true.
You can parse an RSS feed in a manor that will not retain anything to identify it as coming from an RSS. Google will only know it is your content by chronology, in other words that they always find it on your site first.
How would google know that this:
Came from an RSS feed? It is just an a link, identical to the other billions out there.
I have tested this with two WordPress Installs. Both had Google Analytic and were Verified with Google Webmaster.
On the first I would post articles of 100% original content. On the second I would pick them up and then parse the feed, post it as a post, mention it on the social medias and 100% of the articles would stay indexed on the not original domain and 0% would stay indexed on the original domain.
Then, we switched and had 100% indexed on the original domain. We tested it again on two more domains that were not new. One a PR3 and one a PR1 with the exact same outcome.
The single best thing you can do is post it on Google+, in my experience, after I post on Google+, within just a few minutes I have Google bot on the page.
Establish ownership on each of your pages with meta author or meta publisher tags too, it will help a lot.
-
I'm hesitant to give a definite answer on this. Short answer: Yes, Google should understand these are RSS generated links and typically ignore them. But I've also heard grumblings from webmasters who swear this isn't true.
A better question might be: why 100's of sitewide links? And why are they included in the RSS? The RSS typically includes an article body without much additional navigation. If you address these issues, consolidating your links and cleaning your feed, I'd say you likely have little to worry about from scrapers.
-
To answer your first question, yes it can hurt you. Are they doing this without your permission? You can always send them a take down notice. You will find a great article here by SEOmoz's Sarah Bird titled 4 Ways to Protect Your Copyrights.
I am not sure exactly what the question is in the second part. Are you asking if you should put hundreds of site-wide links in your RSS Feed? Either way, here is good measure to take.
-
Make sure you are pinging your posts to more than just one service or so.
-
Make sure you are linking your posts on Google+ as soon as you post them and Facebook / Twitter / Etc. Too.
-
Make sure you have SOME good links to establish clear ownership of content.
-
I would not put a bunch of links in these feeds. Google may see this site, which is probably involved in other not so great activity as a desired backlink to you and you could end up with undesired association, especially if the link count is very high.
-
There is nothing about an RSS feed, once parsed and restructured as a web page that will make it known to Google that it was an RSS Feed.
-
Why do you have an RSS feed and does anyone follow it?
If you do not have anyone following it, you may want to just shut it down for a while. If you have a good following for it then that is not an option. I had an issue with copy-n-paste content hijacking and we put a small bit of JavaScript in that would whatever you wanted into the clipboard as they copied and then they would paste it in their site. We noticed a big drop in activity after they noticed alerts on their website like
"ALERT: All readers of the content, I have a confession. I have stolen this content and I am involved in Blackhat SEO. For those of you who do not know what that is you will probably know my tools. Ever had a virus or got spam mail? You got that because of visiting sites like mine. Please click here to report me because this message was actually inserted by the guy I stole this from and I do not even realize it is here yet."
Not only does it reduce the theft, it is also fun for the whole family. I am sure by now there are similar tools for RSS.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Please have a look at my website. I am stuck here.
Here might be the reason. I had loads of unnecessary content so I given them the noindex tag. I tried to change the robot.txt file but that shouldn't be a problem in SEO. First my site had a country specific domain and then a year later I changed it to .Com, as to target globally (Mainly US). My site is ranking well in that specific country (never been close to page 1) on page 3 almost every time. It's not ranking in other countries, despite the fact that I've not targeted it to any specific country since the domain was changed. A month ago, I deleted 404 pages and all the thin content which was indexed in the SERP and also deleted the duplicated contents and as well as the copied contents. Meanwhile I've also tried changing the headings in some of the products articles as they were causing the duplicate heading issue. I've recently switched my hosting from the UK based server to the Us based server because the last hosting has bad downtime. So far until now nothing seems to be working in my favor. I'm just tired of resolving issues and in return finding a zero result. This is my devil site: 10stuffs.com plz check it out and tell me why my site is not ranking at all and what sould I do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Does the coding of a website really what matter for SEO
Hello, Just wondering if a site that is not coded correctly can hurt your seo even though as a human I can totally understand what is going on on the page and the structure of the website. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How i get link to my website
hi i'm very new in seo want to have links to my website:www.warningbroker.com how i can get links to my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marketing660 -
Competitor Title, can I use the same???
there are some pages, my competitor is ranking well and also, we have done page optimization it is 100% for page title keywords as im going to use the same title of the competitor? Will this affect me? Pls suggest wht should I do..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1190 -
Can you spot the differences?
Well, I have been scratching my head on this for days, I will try throwing the ball to you with hopes someone more experienced than me can help. The scenario is: e-commerce -> brand page -> SERP -> comparison between how two pages rank; one from my website, one from a competitor website. The brand is Michelin, the keyword is "pneumatici michelin" (equivalent in italian of “michelin tires”). I am not looking at SERP first page, where competition is surely much more fierce. I am looking at position 11: http://www.cambio-gomme.it/marchi/michelin/ And my page (not in the first 50): http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/michelin My page: MOZ Page Grade (for keyword “pneumatici michelin”): A External backlinks to the page: 1 Domain Authority: 29 Page Authority: 24 On-page SEO optimization: keyword density: 0.87% internal links: 145 external links: 3 page size: 108kb html size: 24kb words on page: 2077 link-words: 408 non-linked words: 1669 time to first byte: 0.419s Competitor page: MOZ Page Grade (for keyword “pneumatici michelin”): A External backlinks to the page: 0 Domain Authority: 26 Page Authority: 13 On-page SEO optimization: keyword density: 0.75% internal links: 70 external links: 1 page size: 31kb html size: 9kb words on page: 1521 link-words: 168 non-linked words: 1353 time to first byte: 0.373s Domain age is very similar, both websites launched close to each other in 2012. Ideas? Suggestion on other metrics to compare?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | max.favilli0 -
Can we mix up Wordpress and Html?
I have wordpress website. Now I am planning to add html service landing page into it. (by uploading html page on the root folder). After uploading it may look like below URL. My question is can I Html in wordpress website? Google like it or not? http://www.purpleflareagency.com/las-vegas-printing.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
We have two different websites with the same products and information, will that hurt our rankings?
We have two different domains, one for the UK and the other for the US, they have the exact same products, categories and information. (the information is almost the same in 400 products) We know that Google could recognize that as duplicate content, but will that actually hurt our rankings in both sites? Is it better if we create two completely different versions of the content on those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
What are the SEO ramifications to forwarding your website to Facebook?
I have a client who wants to forward their website traffic to a campaign on Facebook for two week. I think it's a horrible idea on so many levels, but need a solid reason why. My gut says that their Google rankings will suffer, but I can't find any research/articles that state such. Help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Axis410