What is your opinion on this?

[DelMarSurf]

I am designing a web site that will incorporate RSS feeds in various places. Do you have to ask permission to display the contents of an RSS feed from the owner of the content?

I am requesting and giving credit (where necessary) anyway, because it is the right thing to do.

Also – do you think the SEs will give me a knock for dupe content?

DEL

[vangogh]

You shouldn't need to at all. The whole idea behind publishing RSS feeds is because you want other people to add that content to their site. Well not the whole idea, but certainly part of it.

If you're worried about it I would think the RSS publishers would have some kind of terms of service on their sites, but I think it's safe to assume you can publish the feeds.

[JuggoPop]

I'ld like to hear the answer to the secound part of the question... I have often wondered about that.

[vangogh]

I think when it comes to dupe content the search engines take everything on your page into account including all the surrounding code. I think it's less an issue than many people think. I've also read in several places where it comes down to a percentage of having the exact same content (code included) and in general it's not something I worry about. I know there are some pages on my site where I've used an article that can be found elsewhere and the page does get found in search engines and drives traffic my way.

If you take a page on your site and make a second version where say just the page title and a few words are changed then I think that would be considered dupe content, but using an article on your site that can be found on other sites doens't seem to me like it would be considered dupe content.

I also don't think dupe content is a penalty thing. It strikes me more as something that just might not count. So if a page of yours is considered dupe content then the page might not be indexed, but I don't think it automatically hurts your site as a whole.

Now if every one of your pages is dupe content then sure your site's going to have some problems. I think dupe content is mostly a way to catch scraper sites that have no original content whatsoever.

There are too many good and valid reasons why the same content can appear on two sites and many of those pages will continue to rank well so I have a hard time seeing where it's a major problem to use rss feeds and free articles.

[DelMarSurf]

Thanks VG for your take on dupe content. I agree with your statement that there are many good reasons to have dupe content.

I am surprised at how little information I have been able to find regarding RSS and copyright law. Too new I guess.

DEL

[vangogh]

I really don't think there's much issue with publishing rss feeds. The whole concept to me is that you want to make it easy for your content to appear elsewhere. RSS publishers have the option of showing a fuil or partial feed so if they don't want you to have all the content they just publish the partial feed and you only get an intro pragraph on your site while the bulk of the content remains on the author's site.

I wouldn't worry much about publishing the feeds, but you can always ask like you are if you're feeling unsure.

[COBOLdinosaur]

I do RSS feeds in both directions. They are important enough that Google has a seperate crawler for feeds. I get a visit from it twice a day. My outgoing feeds contain partial content from the forum which we have on its own class C IP and the links back to the sites and generate traffic that is very targeted. Any time someone comes to my site off of the feed links they are very definitely interested in what is on the site. So doing the feeds is a big gain with very little work.

I also use incoming feeds that bring me traffic. Every day I am getting top 10 SERPs because of keywords in the feeds that are on my pages. The feeds I bring in are related to my content but not 100%. So some of the traffic they generate is of the "look and leave" variety, but some of it genrates "site explorers" who stay on the site and look at a lot of pages. The evidence I have seen so far is that there is no penalty for carrying the feeds, and if anything Google is rewarding me, by giving me credit for keywords that are in the feeds.

There are some very powerful traffic generators that don't cost anything. In April one of my members had their site hit the front page of Digg, and for three days they were buried in traffic, and because it got blogged by some of the Digg community he got a lasting effect out of it. On his front page he has a link to my site. It was generally worth 25-30 hits a week. When he got the hit from Digg I averaged 300 hits a day for the big three days and the numbers from his site have stayed at around 100 a week. Plus a lot of the visitors from that burst picked up my feeds for their own site and I get the hits from those, and the additional backlinks.

When a site makes a feed available, there are no copyright issues as long as you attribute the source and leave their link in the content. It is being made available specifically for presentation on other sites. I think the only way you would get into an issue is if you use the feed for primary content and sell ads based on the imported content.