Blog Posts Appearing on Websites

[timarcher52]

Does anyone know if people republishing content from your RSS feed would hurt your ranking in the search engines? I've read that google will actually lower your pagerank if it starts detecting a lot of duplicate content. Has anyone experienced this?

Personally I would find it offensive for someone to grab content from my RSS feed, make it look like their own, and surround the content with all sorts of ads, etc.

[infodoorway]

I also noticed this almost immediately after starting my blog. My traffic stats started showing referrers from sites I never heard of before, and they were from links with my post titles in them. After checking them out I saw that it was a "duplicate" of my post, or a portion of it. So I assumed it was them using a program to pull my RSS feed, but at least the link to read the rest of the story comes back to my site. I was actually hoping this would help, as backlinks, but I hope it doesn't hurt me in the rankings for duplicate content or for being linked to from unscrupulous sites!