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First things first - what is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a very popular format used to publish frequently updated websites content (like blog) in a standardized format. RSS may consists of titles, headlines, descriptions, images, links, text content and more.

RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

RSS is a good way to connect with websites audience. Visitors may subscribe to a sites feed and stay up to date with the latest news from that website without need to even visit the site itself and only read the new content through an RSS feed.

So can RSS pass PageRank and Link Juice?

I have checked several RSS feed channels and found out that they have a PageRank assigned to it. For example:

BBC (UK) Homepage main promotional content RSS feed - PageRank 6

CNN.com - World RSS feed - PageRank 7

So it means that search engines treat RSS feed as separate web page and assign separate PageRank to them.

I also compared the RSS feed with the web page it covers in terms of PageRank:

BBC homepage - PageRank 8

CNN World - PageRank8

Most webmasters only wish to get PageRank 6 or 7, and in this case those are just an RSS pages!

Based on that analysis i assume that a RSS feed is capable of passing the link juice as long as it does not use a nofollow attribute. In that case no PageRank is passed to other websites.

If there is no nofollow attribute to link in RRS feed it should pass its strength to other pages. Both CNN and BBC are not using a nofollow in their RSS feeds, which means that if they cover your site in their story you will gain a link from their website as well as from their RSS feed and both links should pass some link juice back to your website. Isnt that great?

Ok, but what about duplicate content?

So now we know that a RSS channel may pass PageRank and link juice to other websites. But doesn’t having two exactly the same pages of content (web page and its RSS feed) creates a duplicate content issues?

RSS was created to work as a background source of information, a syndication of a websites content and therefore is is treated differently than normal web page. If you use an RSS feed you do not have to be worry about duplicate content issue as RSS feed is is not the same as your page.

Due to this fact it is not common to see an RSS feed on top ranking in search engines. It is an addition to the website, not its main reason to exist and therefore the PageRank of an RSS feed will be always lower than the main website.

How to keep all link juice on your site

To prevent your site from leaking your link juice through an RSS feed you should put a nofollow attribute to all external links in the feed or alternatively exclude the whole RSS feed from being indexed by search engines. You can add a line of code in the robots.txt file to exclude your feed from being indexed:

Disallow: /feed/

where “feed” represents the URL where your feed is located within your site.

That way you will keep all PageRank on your site.

And by the way, did you subscribed to the SEO/SEM blog RSS feed already? If not feel free to do so.