Tim Yang is claiming that the claim your feed function at Feedster is spamming Google et al…
In order to “claim a feed” bloggers are required to post an entry linking to Feedster that contains a unique id that signifies that the feed does indeed belong to the blogger. The problem, as Tim puts it, is that this is causing thousands of useless entries to be indexed and increase linkbacks and PageRank for Feedster.
No, i don’t think so…
I’m not at all sure this is actually a problem, but i wait to be corrected by the more technically minded SEO’ers in the comments 🙂 For a start, a search for allintitle:claimfeed.php only produces 8 results – As the linkbacks have a unique ID in the url, google have (rightly imo) filtered out what it might see as thousands of individual duplicate pages from feedster. Whether it increases Feedsters PR is unknown to me, but does it really matter? I dont think so.
Also, the thousands of useless pages generated by bloggers claiming their feeds are almost certainly not ranking for anything, so although in the index, i shouldn’t think they’re actually doing any harm.
It’s interesting nonetheless though, search engines have a tough time handling some of the things that go on out there properly im betting, though this one looks to be not causing any major problems.
The question Tim’s post raises though: Is this Feedster trying to game google?
Source: Claiming feeds on Feedster is spamming
Nick Wilson is the publisher and founder of Threadwatch.org.
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