Do rss feeds help seo?

[manintights28]

If we put relevant RSS feeds on a site, will it help the SEO value?

Years ago, I shied away from RSS feeds because they slowed the site down and I didn't like relying on them. However, the past couple years, the Internet has become better, especially in Alaska.

[AgentsofValue]

In general, I think it's good to have RSS feeds for a site.  It's a good way of reaching new viewers, who might only come across your content in a reader or a syndicated version.  Also, lots of social platforms have an option for including an RSS feed - so if you interact on the social platform - people you are interacting with would be able to see some of the most recent content from your site.

Google doesn't count RSS feeds as duplicate content, and is generally smart enough to figure out the original source of the content if it was republished in part somewhere.

[manintights28]

I think the question was not phrased properly.

I don't want to push feeds, but PULL feeds. Will the pulled feeds add SEO value?

[SteveTheWoodsman]

I would strongly suggest staying away from it.  We'll use it for ORM purposes sometimes when the KW diff is really low but for the most part stay away from it as it will most likely get you dinged for duplicate content... no bueno

HOWEVER.  If you still need to scrape other RSS feeds... make sure to give attribution and add a robots noindex meta tag to each page where content is republished.  That way you can hopefully sidestep any and all negative penalties.

[AgentsofValue]

ahh, I see.  I think there can be cases where it's valuable to pull in a feed.  Perhaps an index of relevant headlines around a topic, or maybe headlines from a users blog posts.  I wouldn't use it as the primary basis of an SEO strategy though.

Also, one tip if you're planning on doing something like this.  It's much better to cache the results of a feed on your server, rather than pulling in a live RSS feed every time a user loads a page.  Given the value that Google places on page speed loading, you would probably have a greater negative impact on page load speed by adding RSS feeds to your site, unless you have a cache system in place.