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Matt Cutts: No it’s not desirable to do something like that and I’ll give you a couple reasons why. First off Google tends not to index or really look at RSS or atom feeds all that much. So just because you have a feed showing up in Google Reader doesn’t mean it’s going to affect your search rankings or really have that much of an impact.

The sort of things that Googlebot looks for are good content, nice reputation in the form of links, those sorts of things. So just having an RSS feed, especially stuffing it with old content, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The other reason not to do it is because it will annoy your users. I hate it whenever I’m subscribed to something in Google Reader, and then all of a sudden 57 old blog posts show up and it’s stuff that you’ve already seen before, or that’s three years out of date.

So what I would do is, I would say if you were going to kick off a feed kick it off with two or three really top-notch, high quality stories that grab people’s attention, because that sets the initial impression. People are thinking, “Oh this is a really high quality feed. This is a really great blog. I’m going to keep coming back here,” or I’m going to subscribe to this feed.”

Whatever you do I wouldn’t just load up old content and throw it in there trying to fill it up or hope that Googlebot likes it, or that users will find it. Instead I would stick with brand new content, high quality stuff, things that really capture your attention. Not just, “Well let’s make sure that we make the feed look busy by throwing in a bunch of recycled or old stuff instead.”