Member Avatar for pritaeas

I'm in need of opinions. I currently have several low-traffic Dutch websites, all equipped with an RSS feed built by me. Would it be better for my sites if I promote the feeds at FeedBurner instead of the current on-site ones ? Does it matter for SEO ? Any other benefits or drawbacks ? Of course FeedBurner has extras like statistics, smart feed, email subscriptions and AdSense, which would be helpful anyway. So bottom line, do I need to switch to it ?

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Dani AI

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Short answer: moving a low-traffic site to a hosted feed manager is mostly a convenience/feature decision, not a direct SEO booster. As pointed out, syndicated feeds create copies of your content; that can be handled so it does not harm the original pages. As noted, hosted services add things that can be useful — weigh that convenience against giving a third party control of your feed.

Practical SEO and content-handling tips you can apply immediately:

  • Keep your site pages canonical (use a proper <link rel="canonical"> on the article pages) and make sure each RSS/Atom item links back to the original URL (<link> inside each item and a stable <guid>). Search engines treat the page URL as the primary source when canonical signals are present.
  • If your priority is site visits, deliver excerpts in the feed. If you need full-text syndication, accept that scrapers will copy content and ensure canonical signals remain on the original pages.
  • Use UTF-8 encoding for Dutch characters and serve the feed with the correct content-type.

Quick implementation steps if you decide to switch:

  • Burn the feed at the service and then 301-redirect your current feed URL to the new feed so subscribers and aggregators follow the change. Example (simple Apache redirect):
Redirect 301 /feed/ https://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedname
  • Update the HTML head rel="alternate" feed link to point at the new feed URL:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Site Feed" href="https://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedname" />

Keep a copy of your original feed and export subscriber lists periodically. For low-traffic, try the hosted option for a month and measure whether the added convenience (email, tracking, monetization) actually moves the needle; if not, keep full control on-site.

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Member Avatar for Tiggerito

I feel that promoting RSS feeds via these re-publishing systems have little direct SEO benefit as they are just creating duplicate content.

However they do create new avenues for people to find your website.

Member Avatar for Dani

FeedBurner provides all of the extra statistics and also gives you the option to use AdSense for Feeds to make money through your RSS feeds. Unless they are well syndicated, it probably won't be a whole lot of revenue. But it's an option.

Member Avatar for pritaeas

Thank you both for responding. I'll close it for now. If I can find the original article again, I'll come back...

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