Does Feedburner URL of the Home Page Carry Link Equity?

[TopLeagueTechnologies]

Hi There,

During an SEO Audit, I found that OSE categorizes Feedburner URL of root domains under link-equity passing and followed.

For example, the following link has been categorized under link-equity passing and followed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpoonflowerBlog

I have heard that a lot of SEOs saying feedburner links don't carry any link juice.

If that's true, then why does OSE categorize feedburner URL of root domains under link-equity passing and followed?

I would appreciate if someone from the Moz staff could take some to answer this. Thanks.

[Saijo.George]

Not a Moz staff but here is my 2 cents on the topic :

I don't think Google indexes those results in the SERP site:feeds.feedburner.com . As such I am inclined to believe they carry little to no weight from an SEO point of view.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Good question. Technically, I can't find a robots.txt directive that would prevent Google (or Moz) from crawling those feeds, although Google says otherwise.

Bit of a mystery. Let me check with our engineers and see if they can shed some light.

[TopLeagueTechnologies]

Thanks Cyrus,

I agree that there's a contradiction there and I await your response on this.

Cheers,

[Cyrus-Shepard]

So the short answer is there's nothing in Feedburner's robots.txt to prevent crawlers from accessing those URLs, even indexing them. You'll find them in Moz's index because those URLs are completely discoverable on the web. It appears to me Google is making a special case out of them. Although they don't do that for all Feedburner URLs.

From a larger picture point of view, there's always going to be a discrepancy between what Google counts and what you find in OSE, or Majestic, or Ahrefs.

So we don't really know how Google is treating those URLs. I would suspect they are using them for discovery. It's possible they pass link equity as well, but I wouldn't say that with a lot of confidence.

It's possible we'll considering treating these URLs different in the future if we become more confident in how we believe Google treats them.

Regardless, thanks for the heads up.