I’ve had that happen on a few blogs and it’s really irritating as the feeds aren’t as accessible as the real post! Had a popular singers name do this, was getting hundreds of visitors a day that converted and they started going to a feed which didn’t convert!
I think the reason is the links etc… are posted as txt in feeds, so where you have a link with keyword rich text like domain.com/this-great-phrase.html or whatever Google is counting it as text (which is what it is in these feeds) and so comparatively speaking the feed is more relevant to a search like-
this great phrase
Than the original post because the original post lacks this text!
I’ve started adding rel=”nofollow” to feed links to reduce the problem. View source of http://www.morearnings.com/2006/09/12/wordpress-theme-ocadia-with-google-adsense/ for an example: search for “comments via RSS Feed” to see the code you want to rel=”nofollow” these links. You’ll want to do similar for the menu feed links as well.
A lot of feed links are within the template files, but some are within the WordPress code (not directly editable) so it’s not easy to fix.
If you need more details of what to change feel free to ask.
In the major search engines ‘eyes’ the feeds will no longer have any links (unless you link directly to them), new posts will not have their feeds indexed and long term old feeds should be dropped from the index.
Downside to this is if anyone finds your site via a feed search (no idea if people search for feeds on Google?) your site won’t be found.
David
