What’s Up With That? Vol. 3: SEO at the FeedBurner blog answers a number of
common questions people have about how search engines interact with web feeds,
based in part on FeedBurner having consulted with Google and Yahoo. Among these
are tips on easing duplicate content concerns.
Some people like (and others dislike) when a search engine lists both their
feed and their web site in search results. One suggestion is to do a 302 "temporary" redirect, from your own feed to a
FeedBurner-hosted version. This ensures that if you ever stop using the
FeedBurner version, your original feed will remain seen to the search engines as
the "original" one.
It’s a good tip — but a better one is to make use of FeedBurner’s MyBrand
service, so that your feed always stays in your own domain. The post covers this
to some degree, and my
Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain post from earlier this year does a much
deeper drill down.
Related to this is the idea that you can make clickthroughs from a FeedBurner
URL to one of your items either a 301 "permanent" or 302 "temporary" redirect.
Go with a 301, and you reduce the chances that both your feed item URL and your
actual item URL will both be listed. The 301 helps the search engine understand
that the feed URL is only a pointer, not an item that should be listed on its
own.