RSS is hurting PageRank.
I have to admit to being a bit frustrated by the recent WordPress spam controversy. [Basically, the creator of WordPress, 21-year-old Matt Mullenweg, added some invisible spamvertisement links to the bottom of WordPress.org (which is linked to by many WP blogs and hence has killer PageRank). Matt regrets the decision, which however well intentioned smacks of exploitation and greed, and responds further on his own site.]
It occurred to me, though, as I clicked through my news feeds this morning, that any spam/SEO website can fill itself with rich, interesting content for free. The “search engine optimization” community is starting to get this; I quickly found an article about using RSS feeds to make your site rank better and score higher, and I’m sure there are more out there.
Essentially, any site can grab eyeballs just by recasting itself as a news aggregation service. This used to take some work (scraping other sites, or, even worse, writing news stories) but is now trivial. Google (and Yahoo, and the als0-rans) will need to bake some new smarts into their ranking algorithms to detect and correctly score websites which are just parroting content from elsewhere; this will be a tricky heuristic and I don’t see immediately how to do it. [Side effect of such an algorithm: Many legitimate personal weblogs which do nothing but parrot content will be ranked lower, which is probably the right thing to do anyway.]
Update 4/10: m2m has an article on a similar topic: “No need for scraping, blogging has structured it for you.”