Accepting RSS feeds. Does it = duplicate content?

[peterdbaron]

Hi everyone, for a few years now I've allowed school clients to pipe their news RSS feed to their public accounts on my site. The result is a daily display of the most recent news happening on their campuses that my site visitors can browse.

We don't republish the entire news item; just the headline, and the first 150 characters of their article along with a Read more link for folks to click if they want the full story over on the school's site. Each item has it's own permanent URL on my site.

I'm wondering if this is a wise practice. Does this fall into the territory of duplicate content even though we're essentially providing a teaser for the school?

What do you think?

[mozalbin]

I won't say it's within the borders for duplicate content. 150 characters is a very short amount of text relative to the total amount of text and I don't think any search engine would take that as a bad sign. According to me; you don't have to worry - as long as it stays under 150 characters. I would be intrested to hear what others have to say about this though, someone might have a different opinion?

[peterdbaron]

Thanks, Albin! Appreciate the response; I've been of the same opinion. I'd love to hear what others think too.

Still, I'm wondering if I should simply create an archive of links under a news heading that drives folks to the news items on the school sites rather than creating an individual page for each that contains an excerpt and then the link.

Interestingly, the excerpt pages tend to do pretty well in search. They often return well ahead of the schools'.

[EGOL]

I think that there are two potential problems: 1) duplicate content (which can get your pages filtered from the search results), and, 2) trivial content which can be bitten by panda)

I would not worry much about this content unless you have hundreds or thousands of pages of it.

I would check analytics to see if these pages pull any traffic from search. If not then I would merge them onto long pages instead of on separate pages - or I would block them from indexing by robots txt.

[peterdbaron]

Thanks for the advice.

There are roughly 7600 of these news excerpt page accessed from different areas of my site. A complete archive of news excerpts is accessed here:

http://www.admissionsquest.com/~SchlPostedNews/index.cfm/DisplayMax/999999999

Additionally, school specific news excerpts are available from the various tabs on profiles that have connected school news RSS feeds. Here's an example of a profile & a linked excerpt:

profile:
http://www.admissionsquest.com/cfm_Public/pg_SchlInfo2.cfm/SchlID/842/School/The-Webb-School

news excerpt:
http://www.admissionsquest.com/cfm_Public/pg_SchlNewsItemDetail.cfm/SchlID/842/School/The-Webb-School/SchlNewsItemID/7764/Headline/Registration-and-Orientation-Day-Schedule

In terms of them drawing traffic via search, they do. I see visitors accessing these pages via google, etc. on a regular basis.

Based on what you see above, should I:

1. eliminate our excerpt page model and shift to simply displaying links to new items?

Via this approach, clicking a link would take the visitor directly to the school's site. Right now, they have to visit the excerpt page before clicking the link to jump to my clients' sites.

2. add the tag  to keep them from indexing?

3.  or maintain the status quo?

Thanks again for chiming in, everyone. I very much appreciate the feedback. I look forward to your responses.