The now famous RSS logo has spread all over Internet since its creation in 2005 and globally since the beginning of the Web 2.0 wave. While some propose you solutions in order to gain RSS subscribers, I would like to raise your attention on a different aspect of RSS feed: its effect on Pagerank.
Indeed, as RSS is also a content page and collecting links, it also takes part in your pagerank. If your RSS URL has a different name than your website root then it is possible that it gets a different pagerank than your website.
Let’s take the example of CNN. If you check the pagerank of http://www.cnn.com you will find out that its pagerank rates 9.
However the RSS page for CNN has a different URL, which is http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss. As you can see the pagerank is different. The search engines manage the RSS page as different page and assign them a different pagerank.
Now what happens if your RSS feed has a higher pagerank than your website? You would dream of a Pagerank 6 or 7 and that is your RSS feed that gets it instead of the website. In that case you can implement a simple solution in order to avoid search engines to index your RSS feed.
In order to do that you need to assign No follow attributes to all your links to your RSS address, or even better, disallow search engine browsing for your RSS feeds. You can do it by adding the following line to your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /URL_RSS_Feed/
You should of course replace “URL_RSS_Feed” by your RSS URL.
That makes another line to add to our robots.txt file! Do you have any other suggestions? Do not hesitate to leave a comment!