This RSS Trick Supports SEO Strategy and Sharing
Online marketers are taking and re-purposing your content. Did you know that? Have you see the tweets that say “The ____ daily is out” and tag you or a small number of other users? These daily sites are just aggregate sites that pull together blog posts from many other users that share a common interest or topic or event. If you feel a sense of pride that your content was worthy to be included you need to stop and rethink that.
Google and other search engines don't like duplicate content. The idea that your entire blog post has been republished is not necessarily to your own benefit. It could be hurting you.
There are other ways and methods that are being used to re-purpose content and all of them leverage your site's RSS feed to read and re-publish your content. The best thing you can do to ensure that this is not only to your determent but also becomes and advantage in your marketing strategy is to include a link at the bottom of every RSS feed item that links back to the original post.
If you include a link at the bottom of each RSS feed item you will also make it easier for your RSS subscribers to come back to your site and explore more content. You also will get more backlinks back to your site whenever your feed is picked up by an aggregate site. Lastly that link will tell Google and other search engines that you are the original author of the content.
If you use WordPress the easiest way to accomplish this is to install a plugin that automatically inserts the link for you into the RSS feed. My favorite plugin is “Copyright Footer RSS.”
Install and activate it and you are good to go. You will start seeing something like this at the end of your RSS feed:
I see your rss feed shows the full content of each article. My feed only shows an excerpt. Do you think it makes a difference which way it is displayed?
I think there are different strategies. Traditionally, a lot of publishers like to only show an excerpt of the feed content in order to encourage the consumer to click through to the original website where the traffic is monetized. If the only goal is to drive revenue that can be the best solution. For this and many of my blogs I’m more focused on consumer experience and I think delivering the full RSS feed content makes for happy readers 🙂