if I allow partner sites to republish my RSS feed, will that boost my SEO ranking?

Question

I have a site. Would it help its SEO ranking if I allow B2B business customers to repost the site's blog's RSS feed (I'm thinking of using the partial RSS feed with links back to the site to "read more."), will that boost SEO rankings?

What if I (1) give the business customers (They may not be very tech savvy, and therefore, I'd like to give them the easiest solution.) JavaScript to put on their page that renders the RSS feed? Will the search engines even be able to detect this since it's done with JavaScript Or, (2) should I give them iFrame code? Or, (3) is the best option to write the server-side code (say PHP, Python, Ruby, ASP, JSP, etc.) necessary to serve the RSS feed?

(4) Should I worry about this approach hurting my SEO rankings because of all the duplicate content on different pages?

UPDATE: I would like to go the javascript route that egrunin has suggested below. I had trouble getting the RSS content using javascript because most browsers prevent cross domain ajax. I do not want to force others to write server-side code to request the RSS content. I checked out how twitter does its badges but had trouble understanding it. I think I want to do something like this: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/12/21/json-dynamic-script-tag.html but currently I am using wordpress' out-of-the-box RSS feeds. It's not JSON. I guess I could write a php script that outputs it in JSON. Or, maybe the javascript can parse the XML to JSON. What do you think is the best approach?

Please advise.

UPDATE: I figured it out. See the answer I give below.

Thanks!

Matt

Answer 1

1. Search engines will never see the javascript implementation. I like this option because you need not worry about anything much.
2. iframes are no good.
3. Serverside is a good option, though it requires the most work.
4. RSS is a pretty standard web format. Syndication happens all the time. The big search engines are smart enough to point to the original source.
5. It's not going to help you THAT much in SEO if at all. But it could bring new traffic by reaching a broader audience.
6. This isn't really a programming related question.

Answer 2

Speaking about the pagerank algorithm yes any links to your site from another site are helpful. Meaning if you have links from your client's site to yours it will boost your pagerank.

In terms of what crawlers can see they generally don't fully render JavaScript or iframed content so you should make it a server-side script.

Duplicate content isn't great on the web generally because if they have a better rank then you they might actually appear before you but generally it should be okay especially if they are only posting title/description.

Answer 3

You should give them a simple script tag to paste onto their page, like this:

<script src="MattDiPasquale.com/theScript.aspx"></script>

And then emit whatever javascript you want. That javascript will write out your content.

If your content is links to your pages, yes, it will increase your PageRank. The old rule that search engines ignore javascript-generated content is no longer true.

You emit RSS links instead if you want. That's the beauty of this approach, you have complete control. Also you know which sites are getting how much traffic, which often turns out to be useful.

One downside is that a massive site will put stress on your server. Also, a bug in your code will affect everyone using it, so there's a little extra pressure there.

Answer 4

I finally solved this using a technique called JSONP (JSON with padding).

The feed content to syndicate:
http://www.custudentloans.org/kens-korner

An example of how another domain can embed it on its site:
http://www.acani.com/custudentloans-feed-example

The JavaScript that implements the JSONP:
http://www.custudentloans.org/javascripts/cusl-feed.js

Thanks!

Matt