My client is asking me for something I never heard before - canonical links in an RSS feed.
They are producing original content and are going to expose it via RSS so it can be syndicated by other blogs. They want to put canonical links in the feed so that they get SEO credit for the original article. I suggested they just put for everything in the feed "This article was originally published at myblog.com" but are asking for the whole deal <link rel="canonical" href="..."/>
.
It doesn't quite seem ethical to me to inject that kind of code in someone else's site. And what happens if the other site already has their own different canonical tag? (rhetorical question)
Is it a standard practice to put <link rel="canonical"/>
in RSS feeds? How do other sites handle canonical URLs for syndicated content?