453. Very Briefly: internet crud: feedreader

I do a fair bit of vanity googling, it has to be admitted. The main reason for doing so is to find links back to this blog, so that I can post those links here (i.e. provide a way for readers to see how the different posts fared when tested by others).

In addition to the usual useless SEO-related crud, like xmarks.com, website-tools.net, yourwebsite.com (seriously, those sites provides no value whatsoever) I also stumble across feedreader hits a fair bit.

And they are much more nefarious since they actually penalize your blog in terms of page rank. (now, that may only hurt your ego -- but it might also have financial implications for the big blogs)

An example.

Say you want to compile kernel 3.9, and you for some reason want to get this blog's version of it:

So the first hit is by browse.feedreader.com. I mean, I wrote the post, but the link in the first hit goes to feedreader.com

The nefarious part of this is that because I have an identical post, my post gets relegated to the 200th page -- it's penalized for being simply a copy of the feedreader.com page.

As far as I can see there is also no added value by the feedreader frame that justifies their behaviour either:

In my biased opinion the added frame detracts and is an eye-sore.

In addition, note the bottom panel ('Recent discoveries...')? This takes you to lookup.feedreader.com, which is their internal search engine. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's how they try to monetize their 'service' -- by selling rankings.

Anyway, avoid clicking on feedreader hits -- as a company they don't add anything, and if anything they hurt blogs.