35 Author and Permalink FeedFlare (proof of original source for SEO) June 14, 2008 /

I have created a FeedFlare unit which can be added to your Feedburner feed. This generates a link to the permanent page for each feed item, using the post author's name and the title of your blog as the link text.

Using this FeedFlare will help Google (and other search engines) determine that your post is the original source of content, and prevent scraper sites from ranking more highly in search engine results.

This FeedFlare can be added to any blog feed (not only those hosted by Blogger) and will generate the author's name, blog title and permanent link from the actual blog feed. Once added as a FeedFlare, no additional set-up is required to present the correct attribution for your posts.

Why you should provide a link back to your original post

Scraper sites are blogs which are made for Adsense. Rather than create original content, such splogs prefer to source content from other high ranking sites and present is as their own.

Where duplicate content is found in search results, the one which appears to be from the original source will rank most highly, while any sites which appear to be duplicating this content will feature much lower down the page (if their result even appears at all!).

By using this FeedFlare, you can add a link to the original source (the 'permalink') for each of your blog posts. This helps Google understand that your article is the original content, as Matt Cutts explains:

So if the syndicated article has a link to the original source of that article, then it is pretty much guaranteed the original home of that article will always have the higher PageRank, compared to all the syndicated copies. And that just makes it that much easier for us to do duplicate content detection and say: "You know what, this is the original article; this is the good one, so go with that." (Source)

Why use a FeedFlare for this?

Blogger enables us to add content to the footer of our blog feeds in the Settings>Site Feed section of our dashboards. We could easily add a link to our home page here, but unfortunately we cannot use this to generate a link to each article published on our sites.

For better rankings in search engines, it's important to link to the original article. This can be achieved using Feedburner's FeedFlare API, along with attribution to the post author (great for group blogs) and the title of the publishing site.

How to add this FeedFlare to your Feedburner Feed

Adding the Author and Permalink Feedflare to your syndicated content is simply a matter of copying and pasting one line of code!

Log in to your Feedburner account and access the dashboard for your chosen blog. Click on the "Optimize" tab, then on the "FeedFlare" link in the left sidebar.

On this page, you will notice a section where you can enter a new FeedFlare URL:

In this box, paste the following URL:

http://bloggerbuster.com/author-and-permalink-blogger.xml

This is the location where the FeedFlare XML file is hosted on my server.

Finally, click on the "Add new FeedFlare" button, then you will see this has been added as an additional FeedFlare option which you can add beneath your posts.

All you need to do now is tick the box left of the "Blog Permalink" title, move the position as required and save your preferences.

Then as soon as your Feedburner feed is updated, you will be able to see this link appear beneath each entry of your syndicated feeds!

You can see this FeedFlare in action now by taking a look at the Blogger Buster feed (opens in a new page).

I hope this FeedFlare will be useful for you. Please feel free to let me know what you think about this idea (including any suggestions for improvement) by leaving your comments below.