Yoast SEO plugin and Weak Links
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The plugin has what I thought was a great feature. My main site is often scrapped and I thought 'well at least we're getting a Link out of it' - due to the RSS feature of Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin (you can add a link to the bottom of your RSS feeds).
Now Google is talking about Links from weak/crap sites and how they may impact your rankings. So - with this in mind..
Do we want links from scrappers? Are we now better off discontinuing the usage of this feature?
I imagine there may be varying opinions on this so I'll open it as a discussion...
thanks
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I believe that the balance of the link outweighs the threat of penalty from low quality sites scraping your content - providing your not already seeing warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools.
If your content is being scrapped there will likely be other links in the content anyway (as it's normally good practice to interlink your content within your own content). Removing the link added by the plugin wouldn't remove the links in the content and you would still face the same predicament as if you were to include the footer link.
In the case of your content not being interlinked then the decision would need to be based solely on the quality of the domains scrapping the content and you'd need to do a little bit of research to find the sites that were commonly scraping your content and decide based upon the reputation of those sites.
I don't think an answer to this one will be all that black and white as it's highly situation dependent. If it were doing your rankings major harm then you'd be given a warning in your Google Webmaster Tools and you'd know to disable the footer link in the RSS feed. But if you're getting no warnings, initial impressions of the scraping sites aren't too bad and you've seen no other issues relate to the links then I'd keep the link and hopefully benefit from the free backlink with my chosen anchor text.
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