This article is a discussion of using content generated by RSS feeds on your blogs compared with using original, unique content.
It is a real example of how two very similar sites have performed over a three month period in terms of visitor statistics.
To set up this experiment I chose two very similar domain names in the same niche and registered them.
Both domains were set up on the same hosting account using the same ip address.
Both sites used WordPress as a content management system.
Both sites used the same WordPress theme.
On the first site I installed a RSS content posting plug-in and added a few feeds to it.
I submitted the site to twenty directories.
I did nothing more to the site.
The RSS feed plug-in pulled in syndicated content every day.
At the time of writing this the site has a few hundred pages of syndicated content.
On the second site I wrote ten posts.
I did not spread them out, I just wrote them in the space of an hour or so.
All posts were original descriptive content of about two hundred words each.
I submitted the site to the same twenty directories.
I did nothing more to the site.
Three months later I checked the stats of both sites.
The first site with content syndication received about two thousand visits in the last month.
The site with only ten pages of original, high quality, unique content received over six thousand visits.
Traffic from both sites was mostly from the search engines as the directory traffic had died off and was just a trickle by the three month point.
RSS syndicated content has its uses.
It is great in a sidebar or as filler content.
But from this experiment it is obvious which content the search engines prefer to find on your web pages.