Is it possible for other forums to steal your rankings via your RSS feeds?

[420]

I've been noticing my rankings dropping lately, and when I get my Google reports for all daily search results being reported with my company name in it, are now being flooded by other competing sites that are using my RSS feed. Is this causing my rankings to fall because the spiders are finding my company name on these other sites and ranking them, instead of mine?

Thank you so very much for your valuable time, energy and support.

[420]

How about now?

[Lee G]

You could try limiting the size of your rss feeds to x amount of words, rather than the full content
I know Brian helped me with this once, by adding a new plug in, from memory
Just looked and I cant find what I did at the time. Sorry about that

Or you could try using Tynt
Tynt

Which works on on the copy and paste types.

Hope that helps a bit

[Brian Cummiskey]

There will always be scrapper sites out there. RSS makes it easy, but it can just as easily be done by anyone with a little php knowledge using file_get_contents() or an easy integration of CURL methods.

You need to find what works best for you-- the usability/accesibility/options for your users VS locking everything down.

[420]

So people using my RSS feeds are effectively ripping my SEO rankings, is this correct?

Especially ones who are writing code to do this specifically, is this correct?

If I turn off RSS feeds, then they will not be able to do this anymore, is this correct?

Is there any reason you can think of why I should leave them on?

I do like the idea of hundreds of sites re-posting our news, they click on the articles sometimes and end up at our site.

However sometimes I go to these sites and they have our news, but no way to click on it to get to our site, those are the ones intentionally ripping our content and rankings, is this correct?

Thank you so very much for breaking this down for me, as you can see there are a few things to consider before taking action.

[Brian Cummiskey]

No, they are stealing your content, not your rankings.

And no, even if you disable RSS, there's still at least 2 other ways to get your content.


It's a complete waste of time to try to stop everything, as you will never win. Just focus on keeping your site the best it can be, and it will naturally work out in your favor.

[woostar]

If you want to stop scrappers, have a look into 'Bad Behaviour': Bad Behavior / Bad Behaviour:
They don't do a vB plugin, but to get it working (basically - without logging) just include it in 'init_startup'.