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A question about RSS feeds and nofollow's
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With the nofollow tag used very widely on the internet these days I was just wondering about how an RSS feed might help me find a way around it. Basically my question is this : I post a comment on a blog, it's approved and my comment together with my link(nofollow tag applied) is there. Now when the blogs RSS feed updates, does this nofollow tag get applied to the feed? As far as I can tell it does not - but I'm not too clue'd up on how the feed is generated.
Anyone want to help me understand how it works and if what I'm suggesting would be 'a way around the nofollow tag' ?
Thanks

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Thanks Alan - I'm not looking for brute force link building was just curious about the concept

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@Alan +1
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Regardless of whether they're updated or not, RSS feeds are generating duplicate content and not the original source, so the value is going to be either none, or more likely, less than comments on an original source. And if you're actually here asking this question, I'd suggest that unless you perform a specific test, in a specific situation across a specific market niche, you're not always going to get the same results.
And unless you're looking for brute force link building, it seems like a poor time expense to pursue these given the dupe-content factor. And if you are looking for brute force link building, don't rely on this method being sustainable.
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What about dynamically created blogs and databases - surely comments are also stored in the database and then retrieved when the visitor requests the 'page' ? That would keep updating the feed atleast daily when the cron job is run?
And the commentRSS feed is a dofollow? That can be indexed by the search engine and still sits on the domain? Cos that then sounds to me like a dofollow link coming effectively from the domain of the blog?!
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If you are talking about a commentRSS feed yes, it´s updated when you write a new comment, but the RSS show nofollow tag too. If you are talking about a normal blog RSSfeed, the new comments don´t update the RSS.
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Surely that can'y be the case - since one of the uses for an RSS feed is to track when someone has replied to your comment/made another comment?
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Yes, and the comments don´t update the blog RSS feed.
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