Hi Michelleh,

There's no need to block RSS feeds as they are used for discovery (Gbot). Here's a quirky fact: RSS feeds actually combat the scraper sites as they have absolute URLs which clearly link back to your site They're going to scrape your content anyhow, let's hope they choose RSS!

How does G know it's an RSS feed? Let's look at some of the markup on RSS pages:

<rss <span="">version</rss>="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel></channel>

Either this or something similar will be in the HTML that defines an XML/RSS/Atom/XSL document/markup - this is easily read by Google. Not going to get too far into it but you can start reading more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Does Google index the XML file type? **Yes. **

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=667&q=inurl%3Asitemap.xml&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

Does that help?

You can also download a trial of Black Widow - http://download.cnet.com/1770-20_4-0-.html?query=black+widow&searchtype=downloads&tag=opensearch

Once you've scanned a site, it builds a site architecture that looks like Windows Explorer. You can take screen shots and place them in your documents as needed.

Hi Mark,

I'll try to be ast straightforward as possible and say that the practice of buying/selling links with the intent of passing link value (a.k.a. pagerank, linkjuice) is against Google's quality guidelines.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

Unfortunately this is not uncommon, but there are some things you can negotiate that are within Google's quality guidelines.

If they want to purchase a link, it should be considered as advertising. If it is considered advertising, you should abide by Google's guidelines and add the "nofollow" tag to the link which essentially does not give the link any value. The only value is potential traffic from your site for the buyer(s).

Most likely, the buyer(s) will not agree to this as they are probably buying a followed link in order to pass pagerank from your site to theirs - in order to manipulate search rankings.

Would I do it? Nope, not worth the risk. However, I would be more favourable to link to them if they advertised with me. I would only link to them if they had relevant, related and good quality content that I genuinely wanted to refer my visitors to.

I'm guessing you're not a casino site, so you might want to steer clear from this transaction.

Regarding your second question:

Linking to "bad neighborhood" or poor quality sites can also affect your rankings - this is a known fact. Have a good look at their site:

1. Is it a link farm
2. Poor content, tons of ads/adsense
3. Questionable material (adult etc..)
4. Malware, spyware
5. Thin affiliate site
6. Do they have business contact details clearly visible
7. Is it easy to contact them
8. Is the content on their site being scraped from another

I think you get the picture, definitely have a read of what Rand said a few years ago:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/more-on-nofollow-at-seomoz-and-how-bad-outbounds-can-impact-websites

That post is still very relevant and sums up the point quite nicely.

Be cautious and good luck.

Cheers,

Dave

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/