RSS the SEO’s Worst Nightmare !
Sometimes the things that Google do just make my head hurt, aka "the unnatural link warnings". I am pretty sure most SEO agencies out there will have come across at least one of these, I know I have, and most new clients come with one these days.
But I'm not too sure how many other SEO's have had the link warnings with "Examples" of the kind of links that are causing you the issues, I have. But what surprised me more than anything was the 6 links that the Mighty Google shared with my client, one was an old ezine article which was 6 years old and the other five were from scaper sites that had used the clients RSS and wrapped Adsense around them.
Well roll forward SIX months and today Barry at SEroundltable noticed this on the Google webmaster help forum:
OMG, the BBC got a link warning! Aat first I just smiled and started to move on then in the back of my mind I thought will this affect them in any way, so I went to the BBC clicked on a recent story and copied some text:
"A 15-year-old boy has denied killing a pensioner who died when she was mugged for her handbag."
I then searched Google :
HMMM I don't know who syndicated who first but it's all duped, so I took another approach:
I decided to look at www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21784141 even I was surprised with the 31,603 links in Ahrefs the story only went live today !!
So here's the issue everyone is just using the BBC's RSS on their websites.
1) If you can get 30,000 backlinks in few hours for free, how many links would you buy?
2) If the BBC have done nothing but syndicate their website like millions of others, why would Google send them the unnatural link warning.
3) But this is the BBC, what if it was just another website that got hit, just like a new client of mine that is now spending 1000's on the clean up of links that they never purchased, they just created great content on their site and let people syndicate VIA RSS.
4) I'm sorry to say it but @bbc have you thought about a rebrand? What's the cost of cleaning this lot up? :
Because of one stupid mistake .. RSS
16 Comments
James
I’ll admit it, I have sites that supplement original content with posts drawn from RSS. It’s not original and it’s not clever, but that’s what RSS is for.
If you don’t want your content to be syndicated, don’t provide an RSS feed. Of course, that breaks feed readers, so perhaps RSS needs something like robots.txt to say “read but don’t syndicate”, not that any of the scraper sites would pay the least bit of attention to it.
It is quite amusing when I get link removal requests and they’re totally unaware that their site has a feed.
Gareth - http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/
Its not clever, but used to be my biggest adsense earner churning out a 1000 posts per month from one site 🙂
Timo
What’s the name of the tool? 🙂 http://dn.broncoweb.co.uk/wpimg/n3.jpg
Timo
Ahrefs is the answer … sorry 😉
John - http:/cameralenscoffeemugs.co.uk
Timo that’s http://ahrefs.com
Jade Tara Whitehead (@themodernseo)
Thanks for posting this up! Was chatting about this about an hour ago and doing some head scratching.
Curtis - http://www.curtuk.co.uk
Hi David.
I see what your saying but “I’m sorry to say it but @bbc have you thought about a rebrand?” it a ludicrous comment. The BBC is a billion dollar brand.
As for the RSS, granted this needs to be looked at and re-planned but the fact is.. News is news and it deserves to get syndicated. Whether it is duplicate content or not. You can’t suggest that a massive news article can only remain on one website/one tv program etc. News gets syndicated. Websites share it.
Google just need to recognise this and clean it up.
Anyway, rant over. Thanks for the post.
Curtis
David Naylor
@Cutris LOL, I was joking about a re-brand for the BBC but we had to re-brand a site awhile go due to this exact problem
Curtis - http://www.curtuk.co.uk
Lols just playing with ya anyway! I think Google need to recognise that syndication on a site like the BBC is bound to happen purely because the news that they share is on a large scale and needs to be accessed from multiple sources. I was kinda hoping the big G would see that this is the BBC and that this was some sort of hoax to be honest. Granted big sites get hit too but for syndication seems a little odd.
(Y)
Google Sends BBC News A Manual Link Penalty Notification - pingback
[…] David Naylor believes the reason the BBC received this notification was due to how RSS scrapers abuse the BBC. […]
Tom Roberts - https://twitter.com/tjproberts
Given the annus horribilis the BBC has had, I don’t think a re-brand that far out of the question.
Tom Roberts - https://twitter.com/tjproberts
*is that far, I should say.
I accidentally a word.
Mike Charalambous - http://www.michaelcharalambous.com/
I’m not quite sure if you’re joking about RSS being a nightmare or not? As stated above, news is their to spread and syndicate. Google has got this one MAJORLY wrong.
I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, and I’ll continue to say it. Google needs to fix up because quite simply, it is not the job of a website owner to control the links pointing towards them. True story.
Only in the minds of us, marketers, SEOs and what-have-you is that our job. In actual fact, it really isn’t a website owners job to control inbound links. Controlling inbound links = talk about unnatual?
Will Stevens
It seems odd that scraped RSS links would trigger an unnatural links warning, I mean surely it’s a simple algorithmic fix?
Not that I’m disagreeing with what David’s saying, he’s clearly seen this happen before. It just seems stupid that Google could allow this to be an issue.
I guess it would be possible to abuse RSS syndication to farm links, but surely by and large it’s a a sign that a site is doing what Google wants – producing great content.
It’ll be interesting to see what the big G has to say about this. (Nothing, I’d wager)
Alen MJ - http://iloveujesus.com
Content Scrapers are really a curse for Bloggers ! But there was time when were considered free link builders 🙂 RSS Footer was one of the popular among these .. http://www.yoast.com/make-the-scrapers-work-for-you/
Jon - http://www.essexportal.co.uk/
So, is there a way to stop people scraping your RSS feed? I have seen this a little with one of my sites. Now concerned it has become a problem.