I’m feeling a little brain-dead at the moment, so I’m throwing this question out.
I want to store items from a couple of feeds (all different varieties of RSS) in a database. What is the best way to make sure I don’t save the same entry more than once into the database?
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RSS is a great tool, and can be used to spread your websites information. However coming from a search engine marketing background I wanted to let you know how this can hurt your search engine rankings. Many inexperienced webmasters and website owners erroneously think that anything on an RSS feed is free information that they can use in their website content. Instead of using an RSS reader, they just copy the content into their website.
We have had a few clients who have used RSS feed to promote their news articles, only to find that these pages were getting duplicate content from websites that did not use RSS feed, but rather just copied their news articles into their content pages.
Your site can loose rankings for these pages, and can also loose its reputation in the search engines eyes. So if you are going to let others have access via RSS feed (which is fine) make sure you protect your interests by always checking the web to make sure that your content is only on your pages. If you find it elsewhere, just contact the webmaster and let him know he needs to take it down. Usually they did not do this maliciously, and will take it down right away. If they don’t, you should probably send a cease and desist letter.
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