RSS - What Do You Know About This?

[mjtaylor]

I searched RSS on V7N today and I couldn't find any threads. It's a topic I know little about ... and should probably know more. I posted a guest blog post today on my site on the topic, and felt pretty miserable that I know so little.

Anyone have any advice on how RSS feeds?

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by Tiggerito

Interesting point about it being part of the PR structure. I've never seen a feed in search results so I guess it's like a noindex, follow type file. The latest articles shown in a feed may get a slight boost because of it.

http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/...ml#post1904544

It's not the feed source itself that accrues PR, but rather the pages which display the feeds.

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[Tiggerito]

I'm not clear on what a feed source is (the xml file?) and how it differs to the page that displays the feed?

The examples from Bruce Clay show the actual xml file has the PageRank. I tested one and it's true.

I did a search for the title of the first example and the actual feed showed up in results. So they are also in the index.

So it looks like Google does index and rank RSS files but it looks like they have a low score in other factors so they don't show up much.

[mjtaylor]

I don't understand the difference between the feed page and the feed, either, and I also checked the pages Bruce Clay mentioned in SEOMoz and they all had strong PageAuthority.

[deepsand]

The pages cited by Bruce are not the feeds themselves, but rather pages that contain provide for access to the feeds.

The first one, http://blog.nikonians.org/index.xml, uses iPod podcasts to broadcast content, as shown by the following source code from that page.

<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">

<channel>
<title>Nikonians News - Photography &amp; Imaging News and Podcasts</title>
<link>http://blog.nikonians.org/</link>
<description>Nikonians - The Worldwide Home for Nikon Photographers - Photo News &amp; Podcasts</description>
<language>en</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2012</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>Tue, 31 Jul 2012 01:21:26 +0100</lastBuildDate>
<generator>http://www.movabletype.org/?v=4.1</generator>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs> 
<itunes:new-feed-url>http://podcasts.nikonians.org/index.xml</itunes:new-feed-url>

The actual feed source is http://podcasts.nikonians.org/index.xml, as shown in the last line of the above code.

While the page cited by Bruce, http://blog.nikonians.org/index.xml, does indeed have a TBPR of 4, the actual feed, http://podcasts.nikonians.org/index.xml has only TBPR 3.

That this particular feed has PR owes, not to its URL being on the page cited by Bruce - its presence there is not in the form of hyperlink, i.e. it is not an actionable link, and therefore does not count for PR purposes - but by virtue of it's being publicly accessible and having been discovered by others, so that they may in fact link directly to it. This is not necessarily the case for all feeds.

So, to clarify, and is evident from a close reading of this article, Bruce was speaking of the PR that the page that provides access to the feed, not to the feed itself.

[mjtaylor]

Well, I am glad we have that cleared up. But the impact on SEO or any advice pertaining to the use of feeds?

[deepsand]

Just the usual.

Good content on the page that provides access to an RSS feed can be good link bait.

And, the fewer the OBLs on that page, and the less often it's updated, the greater and longer lasting the benefit to the targets of those OBLs.

[mjtaylor]

Originally Posted by deepsand

Just the usual.

Good content on the page that provides access to an RSS feed can be good link bait.

And, the fewer the OBLs on that page, and the less often it's updated, the greater and longer lasting the benefit to the targets of those OBLs.

Hm. So, blogging every day is not a good thing for those posts.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by mjtaylor

Hm. So, blogging every day is not a good thing for those posts.

Obviously there are trade-offs involved, ones that apply regardless of whether or not the page in question provided access to an RSS feed.

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[mjtaylor]

I hate to digress from the OP but I checked with the OP and she doesn't mind ... but it would seem to me that the addition of content (assuming quality content, of course) would outweigh any disadvantages.

And back to the topic:

What else can we say about RSS?

[Cricket]

This is the best site (run by a friend of mine) for understanding just about everything involving RSS. Use the sidebar navigation to work through the information one step at a time. http://www.rss-tutorial.com/

[Tiggerito]

Some tips from my experience.

The content of a feed item can be in html as long as it's xml encoded or in CDATA sections.

I'd recommend including links in the content to ensure you get backlinks when it gets syndicated.

Ensure all links are full (http://...) as they will be placed on different websites. That includes images.

Some think the content should be a snippet while others think it should be the whole article. On my website I provide two feeds and both options.

I personally don't like feedburner because I find it hard to subscribe to those feeds using my Google Reader.

It's best to include correct dates and the unique identifier. Most feed readers need this info to determine order and track if there are new items.