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
-
Need references to a company that can transition our 1000 page website from Http to Https without breaking our SEO backlinks and site structure
Hi Ya'll I'm looking for a company or independent who can transition our website from http to https. I want to make sure they know what they're doing with a Wordpress website. More importantly, i want to make sure they don't break any seo juice from external sources while internally nothing gets broken. Anyone have any good recommendations? You can reply back or DM me. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
301 a website to mine within a subfolder
Hey there Mozzers, I have purchased a very amazing Social Media Related Plugin. I already have a business website about digital marketing which pretty much falls in the same category. I am thinking of transferring that plugin into a subfolder of my own website. Is there anything I should keep in mind when I do that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS1 -
Website Indexing Issues - Search Bots will only crawl Homepage of Website, Help!
Hello Moz World, I am stuck on a problem, and wanted to get some insight. When I attempt to use Screaming Spider or SEO Powersuite, the software is only crawling the homepage of my website. I have 17 pages associated with the main domain i.e. example.com/home, example.com/sevices, etc. I've done a bit of investigating, and I have found that my client's website does not have Robot.txt file or a site map. However, under Google Search Console, all of my client's website pages have been indexed. My questions, Why is my software not crawling all of the pages associated with the website? If I integrate a Robot.txt file & sitemap will that resolve the issue? Thanks ahead of time for all of the great responses. B/R Will H.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
How To Implement Pagination Properly? Important and Urgent!
I have seen many instructions but I am still uncertain. Here is the situation We will be implementing rel prev rel next on our paginted pages. The question is: Do we implement self referencing canonical URL on the main page and each paginated page? Do we implement noindex/follow meta robots tag on each paginated page? Do we include the canonical URL for each paginated page in the sitemap if we do not add the meta robots tag? We have a view all but will not be using it due to page load capabilities...what do we do with the viewl all URL? Do we add meta robots to it? For website search results pages containing pagination should we just put a noindex/follow meta robots tag on them? We have seperate mobile URL's that also contain pagination. Do we need to consider these pages as a seperate pagination project? We already canonical all the mobile URL's to the main page of the desktop URL. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo320 -
Google does not favour php websites?
Hi there. An SEO company recently told me that google does not favour php development? This seems rather sketchy, I have not read that google doesn't favour this anywhere, did I just miss that part of SEO or are these guys blowing a little smoke?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital1 -
How to structure articles on a website.
Hi All, Key to a successful website is quality content - so the Gods of Google tell me. Embrace your audience with quality feature rich articles on your products or services, hints and tips, how to, etc. So you build your article page with all the correct criteria; Long Tail Keyword or phrases hitting the URL, heading, 1st sentance, etc. My question is this
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Let's say you have 30 articles, where would you place the 30 articles for SEO purposes and user experiences. My thought are:
1] on the home page create a column with a clear heading "Useful articles" and populate the column with links to all 30 articles.
or
2] throughout your website create link references to the articles as part of natural information flow.
or
3] Create a banner or impact logo on the all pages to entice your audience to click and land on dedicated "articles page" Thanks Mark0 -
Website change of address
Hi Everyone, I apologize if the answer to this questions is obvious, but I wanted some input on how changing our web address of our site will affect our SERP. We are looking to change our website address from a.com to b.com due to rebranding of our company (primarly to expand our product line as our current url and company name are restricting). I understand that this can be done using 301 direct and via webmaster tools with google. My question is how does this work exactly? Will our old website address show in SERP rankings, and when a user clicks on the listing are they redirected to our new address? With regards to building new links from press releases etc, do we have links point to our new web address or the old one in order to increase SERP? Does google see our old address and new address as the same website and therefor it does not matter where inbound links point to and both will increase our ranking positions? It took 6 years of in house seo to get our website to rank on the first page of all the major search engines for our keywords, so we am being very cautious before we do anything. Thanks everyone for your input, it is greatly appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AgentMonkey0