Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am more of a layperson, and joined this site to research certain topics.

I wrote a blog post on the topic of RSS feed scraping and content theft .. which if I understand it was not exactly the OP question.

Having read the other answers here, however, I am actually wondering if my blog post is inaccurate ... or incomplete, and needs correction.

Are you all saying that there is no harm in your RSS feed being scraped, and it might actually be helpful due to the backlinks you might get?  Or are you saying that Google ignores those links as it is clear they come from an RSS feed?

Or, am I misunderstanding your point entirely?

THanks for clarifyingl  Here is the post if anyone wants to scan it and respond.

http://info.icopyright.com/discovery-copyright-infringement-detection/blog-content-theft-protect-your-blog-from-rss-feed-scrapers

Thanks

PS if I have misunderstood the protocol, and am not to piggyback on someone elses topic, or add a link, please advise.  My first foray into this forum

I do need to give recognition to David's answer below. For while most of the time you don't need to worry about RSS links, I've heard of webmasters who've been stung by this. It seems likely to hit lower authority sites harder.

If it is a concern, at least you have the power to do something about it.

1. Always place a rel canonical on every page, with an absolute URL (full path) This way if the scrapers take the whole page, the canonical link pointing to yourself might stay in tact.

2. If you suspect over-optimization filters you can de-optimize your anchor text, or add greater variety.

3. In extreme cases you can file a DMCA takedown request of your copywrited content, but at volume this solution doesn't scale, and is a messy business regardless.\

Regardless, these are for the minority of cases. Most of the time you shouldn't have to worry about it.

Normally, I would bow out as I must be mistaken to any of the SEO Staff at SEOmoz as each of them have forgotten more than I will know.  However, I have spent a lot of time on this issue, I learned jQuery for the reason of combating this.  I am 100% certain, at least for how it was between June 2012 and Feb. 2013.

I realize that Google has stated they can tell the difference but, Google has a policy of misinformation as part of it's strategy to protect search integrity.  I give misinformation it's due credit, it ended the cold war, but it also means you cannot trust anything Google says until it is proven true.

You can parse an RSS feed in a manor that will not retain anything to identify it as coming from an RSS.  Google will only know it is your content by chronology, in other words that they always find it on your site first.

How would google know that this:

SEO Software of Choice

Came from an RSS feed?  It is just an a link, identical to the other billions out there.

I have tested this with two WordPress Installs.  Both had Google Analytic and were Verified with Google Webmaster.

On the first I would post articles of 100% original content.  On the second I would pick them up and then parse the feed, post it as a post, mention it on the social medias and 100% of the articles would stay indexed on the not original domain and 0% would stay indexed on the original domain.

Then, we switched  and had 100% indexed on the original domain.  We tested it again on two more domains that were not new.  One a PR3 and one a PR1 with the exact same outcome.

The single best thing you can do is post it on Google+, in my experience, after I post on Google+, within just a few minutes I have Google bot on the page.

Establish ownership on each of your pages with meta author or meta publisher tags too, it will help a lot.

I'm hesitant to give a definite answer on this. Short answer: Yes, Google should understand these are RSS generated links and typically ignore them. But I've also heard grumblings from webmasters who swear this isn't true.

A better question might be: why 100's of sitewide links? And why are they included in the RSS? The RSS typically includes an article body without much additional navigation. If you address these issues, consolidating your links and cleaning your feed, I'd say you likely have little to worry about from scrapers.

To answer your first question, yes it can hurt you.  Are they doing this without your permission? You can always send them a take down notice.  You will find a great article here by SEOmoz's Sarah Bird titled 4 Ways to Protect Your Copyrights.

I am not sure exactly what the question is in the second part.  Are you asking if you should put hundreds of site-wide links in your RSS Feed?  Either way, here is good measure to take.

1. Make sure you are pinging your posts to more than just one service or so.

2. Make sure you are linking your posts on Google+ as soon as you post them and Facebook / Twitter / Etc. Too.

3. Make sure you have SOME good links to establish clear ownership of content.

4. I would not put a bunch of links in these feeds.  Google may see this site, which is probably involved in other not so great activity as a desired backlink to you and you could end up with undesired association, especially if the link count is very high.

5. There is nothing about an RSS feed, once parsed and restructured as a web page that will make it known to Google that it was an RSS Feed.

6. Why do you have an RSS feed and does anyone follow it?

If you do not have anyone following it, you may want to just shut it down for a while.  If you have a good following for it then that is not an option.  I had an issue with copy-n-paste content hijacking and we put a small bit of JavaScript in that would whatever you wanted into the clipboard as they copied and then they would paste it in their site.  We noticed a big drop in activity after they noticed alerts on their website like

"ALERT:  All readers of the content, I have a confession.  I have stolen this content and I am involved in Blackhat SEO.  For those of you who do not know what that is you will probably know my tools.  Ever had a virus or got spam mail?  You got that because of visiting sites like mine.  Please click here to report me because this message was actually inserted by the guy I stole this from and I do not even realize it is here yet."

Not only does it reduce the theft, it is also fun for the whole family.    I am sure by now there are similar tools for RSS.