Your RSS Might Be Considered Duplicate Content

Believe it or not, having an RSS feed might lower the number of listed pages from your blog in the Search Engine Results Page. Why? The answer rests in two words: duplicate content. When a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!, encounters your blog, it sees both the content from the particular blog post itself and the content from the RSS feed for the corresponding blog post. Essentially, the search engine is seeing similar content in two different places on the same domain. Each of these places, RSS and the blog page, competes for placement within the search engine results page (SERPs). While it is not a negative thing to offer readers an RSS feed, offering the search engines an RSS feed without adequate instructions will result in lowering the number of indexed posts.

How do I fix duplicate content from my RSS feeds?

Fixing duplicate content coming from RSS is quite easy. The Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin offers the ability to tell the search engines not to index RSS feeds. Human beings will still be able to see that an RSS feed is available when visiting your site. And even though the search engines will also see that RSS has been made available, they will not index RSS information. Thus your site will not be competing against itself to have a listing in the SERPs.

What about the All in One Seo Pack?

It is important to know how <meta robots=”" /> is being implemented throughout a site. While the All in One SEO Pack helps to prevent duplicate content in addition to providing useful <title></title> ,<meta description=”" /> , <meta keywords=”" /> information, it does not yet offer the ability to control what the RSS Feeds are doing. The All in One SEO Pack and the Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin offer similar features in some areas, while they differ in other areas.

• I would recommend using the All in One SEO Pack for features pertaining to description, title, and keywords. In other words, the strength of the All in One SEO Pack rests in telling the search engines “how” it presents your blog information to the search engines.
• The Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin is better suited for performing noindex and general clean-up functions. The strength of this plugin rests in telling the search engines “what” can presented from your site in the results page.

Case Study

I often visit Google in order to see how many of my personal blog posts it has indexed to the SERPs.

• http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ashop-network.org%2Fblog%2F&btnG=Google+SearchbtnG=Google+Search

Beginning few days ago, the number of blog entries was decreasing. One day, the number of entries was 8, and the next day, the number would slip down to 5. The day after, the number would increase to 9, then slip down again to 4 the following day. While I understand that Google enjoys shuffling their SERPs, I found it odd that much of the unique content from my blog was not indexed at all. In addition, what had once been indexed was not showing up anymore.

After installing the Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin, however, I noticed that the number of blog entries that Google had indexed began to rise. Unless otherwise noted, the search engines will index all pages found, and will follow the links on those pages.