With FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost posted in the sidebar of my other blog which had PR 3, in less than 2 weeks I noticed the blog’s PR dropped to 0. However I have no actual proof that the reason why the PR dropped is BuzzBoost but I can’t seem to find another plausible explanation.
Is BuzzBoost actually hearting SEO ? I know that Google doesn’t like duplicate content and so I’ve heard that it will skip indexing any pages that publish duplicate content. I did a little bit of researching and found this interview regarding the duplicate content issue.
…And, I think the search engines explicitly understand what a feed is. It’s very simple for them to recognize a feed during their crawl and they act on that by concluding that the feed is not a permanent place for the content, and therefore eliminating the duplicate content concern that you alluded to. It’s not to say that it’s an irrational concern, but in many cases, it’s not one that the publisher should be really concerned about. I think the search engines are increasingly very smart about understanding the difference between a feed and webpage, and understand the purpose of the feed as indicating where the content lives.
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services at FeedBurner
Source of the interview: StoneTemple
I have removed FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost widget and now I’m waiting to see if my PR will be back again (this should happen in approximately 3-4 weeks or so).
However Google states that articles syndicated with a link back to the original article should not be a problem.
If you wonder if your content has been copied (of course now I am referring to intentionally content copying) you can always use Copyscape to determine who is copying your content.
If you find out that your content is being copied you might want to refer to Google’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act
It’s very hard for me to believe that BuzzBoost is the actual cause of my problem but I can’t imagine anything else being the source of my PR drop. For the moment this is all the information I have and as soon as I find anything else related to this issue I will post it here.
These were my BuzzBoost settings:
If you also encountered PR drops while having FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost installed on your blog/website feel free to leave a comment.
Subscribe to my feed.
Stumble It! • Digg This! • Save to del.icio.us • Add to Mixx! • Sphinn It! • Email this
Have you seen whether this actually effected your PR yet?