SEO tips for RSS feeds?

[nicole.healthline]

What SEO advice do you have for RSS feeds?

Specifically, does the URL structure matter?

Should the be noindex, follow or noindex, follow?

Any other advice?

[KeriMorgret]

Do you mean in creating your own RSS feed, or in displaying RSS feeds from other sites on your site?

[nicole.healthline]

Creating my own RSS feed

[RyanKent]

Use complete URLs in your articles to refer back to your site.

RSS feeds are often picked up by other sites. This is your chance to use solid anchor text.

Keep in mind your RSS feed will generate content which already exists on your site (i.e. duplicate content) so the value will be minimal.

[nicole.healthline]

Hi Ryan,

What about feedburner urls? Any best practices for feedburner?

[nicole.healthline]

complete urls vs what? can you provide an example? I am referring to the actual url of the rss feed--does it matter what the structure of the url is?

[KeriMorgret]

What Ryan means is that when you write an article and link to your own site, be sure to use the full "http://www.sitename.com/page-im-linking-to" instead of just "/page-im-linking-to". The first one includes the full URL, which means that if someone else puts it on their site, it will still link to you. Most of the scrapers are lazy, and don't replace those links.

[nicole.healthline]

Is there a way to noindex, follow RSS feeds? Which is better, to noindex, follow the RSS feed or to block them with robots.txt?

[nicole.healthline]

Thanks for the quick reply. I am wondering if the url structure of the url for an rss feed matters? such as

/rss/[content type]

vs

feeds/domain/topic

vs any other url structure for the feed. My suspicion is it probably doesn't matter, but i just want to make sure.