I’ve noticed over the last month or so that many backlinks I am finding in Google, while doing link research for clients, are RSS feeds from free directories. What’s even more intriguing is that these appear to show up towards the top of the results when I use the link operator. Even more interesting, is that the pages that the links are displayed on within the site typically don’t carry any PR and aren’t indexed.

My preliminary finding seems to be that even if some of these free directories suck on site, they appear to please Google in RSS form. Below is an example from today’s research. I ran the link operator for one of my clients competitors and the first backlink Google listed was http://www.seagency.net/rss.php?c=456&s=H. I did a little snooping and found the competitor site over 3/4 of the way down the list of links. Which means even though it’s a good 400 links in, Google is still picking it up as a relevant backlink.

After discovering that the site sat so low in the RSS feed I decided to check out the listing on the physical site itself. The backlink is found on page 20 of the directories Real Estate and Property category; the page has no PR and is NOT indexed. Furthermore the page itself is not listed within the backlinks for the site.

While I obviously can’t say that this is the case for EVERY RSS fed directory, I have a strong hunch that as more directories feed themselves via RSS we may see more of this. Google obviously isn’t viewing and giving value to RSS fed links the same way it is links on the physical website. Furthermore if you subscribe to the theory that the order links are listed when you run a link operator are an indicator of importance, then it would seem that the links fed via RSS hold a significant value in the eyes of Google. For now I am going to hop and the bandwagon and see if I can’t suck some of the link juice from some of these directories, I’m sure it’s only time before Google sees things differently.

I’ll continue to look into this and if/as I find new information I will definitely be posting more about it.