Are automated feeds hurting my position and value in search engines?

Hi.

I run a fairly large forum but I seem to not get a constant increase in organic search traffic on the way although I usually have 50-100 new threads and posts each day.

One reason could be that I have a designated forum with in my case Environmental RSS feeds and all the individual posts. This is the link if you want to have a look: Environmental News from the Web - TheEnvironmentSite.org Discussion and Information Forums

What is your experience with having automated feeds on your vB forum? Does it influence the ranking, etc? Would it be better for me to remove that forum?

Generally, having RSS (or any other non-original) content is not a good idea. A few posts here and there, no big deal, but you want the majority of your content to come from humans and not from another site. Google knows who posted it first, and none of these pages will likely ever rank anywhere worthwhile.

I would suggest moving this into a member only view forum. It may be informational to your users.

Excellent. I will do this. Only through forum permissions. Correct?

Will this then also prevent search engines from indexing them? I do not want to have the RSS feeds indexed.

Thanks for the advice.

Originally Posted by phreak79

Excellent. I will do this. Only through forum permissions. Correct?

Yes, that's right.

Originally Posted by phreak79

Will this then also prevent search engines from indexing them? I do not want to have the RSS feeds indexed.

Of course. Search engines are treated as guests.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Generally, having RSS (or any other non-original) content is not a good idea. A few posts here and there, no big deal, but you want the majority of your content to come from humans and not from another site. Google knows who posted it first, and none of these pages will likely ever rank anywhere worthwhile.

I would suggest moving this into a member only view forum. It may be informational to your users.

Why is RSS Content not a good idea?
I get a few thousand visitors each month via my RSS Content.
It is a low percentage compared to the rest of the visitors on my forum but non the less they are visitors.

I did not notice that it hurt me either, the content is listed on google and that is what counts.

Excellent. Thanks for the clarification.

I have noticed something new from when I changed this yesterday. For some reason Google now visits the showthread.php a lot more then ever before. I was always surprised that the statistics in the vbseo control panel (visits of search bots) only showed minimal visits by Google to the thread (10 max per day). Yesterday it counted 1.500!

Lets hope this will give me more visits from now on. Maybe has this small change made a huge difference.

Any idea what this might be?

So automatic tools that for example auto post my threads on facebook and twitter through bit.ly are bad too?

No, we are discussing incoming, not outgoing.