Hey folks,
I am getting involved with integrating an RSS feed into my site, this will be for publishing purposes and I wanted to know if anyone has had any experiences or insight into the ramifications or (hopefully) benefits of this strategy.

Here is my situation:

We are a portal/advertising/lead generation site for the relocation industry, I have many tips/articles/moving faqs pages that we update every so often with fresh stuff, we also have many pages of content on our advertisers. We were thinking of utilizing the feeds to attract additional traffic to these areas.

Question:

We are debating if utilizing the RSS feeds will in anyway harm our current position and ranking with google. We have thousands of backlinks and very few outgoing links, so if we get a sudden influx of links from our RSS efforts that causes greater crawler activity, do you think or have you heard of any possibility of harmful backlash from these efforts since it is a commercial site. Many clients will advertise in multiple cities/states (like a superpages) so there might be some duplication issues, however there is a GEO specific title on each unique page regardless of who is advertising in that area

I very much appreciate any comments or insight that anyone might be able to contribute. Let me know if you need more information..

Thanks...

There are many pros and some cons for a publisher to provide an RSS feed for others to syndicate with.

Pros:
(1) Easy way to get your content syndicated
(2) More eyes on your content
(3) Method to increase your backlinks
etc...

There is one major con. If you provide a full RSS feed of the full contents, a scraper can take your content and rank above you in the SERPs. Many just offer a snippet (abstract) of the full content and then the individual reading that content will hopefully click through.

Thanks for the information RB...

So what you are saying is that the only possibly detrimental effect (con)
is that somebody or a scraper might boost our content and rank higher in the SERPS.
Good advice, thanks. Anyone else have something to add I would appreciate it.