RSS feed - does it help?

PhiltheBear · Oct 6, 2008

Firstly, I confess ignorance as to how RSS feeds work (so maybe someone will help with that too

)

What I'm looking to do is introduce a newsfeed to a homepage so that it will display either a news item or link to a news item which is relevant to the homepage. So, if my site were, say, diet related I could show the latest 'diet' news-story.

My hope is that by doing so my homepage will change sufficiently often that the search engines will keep assuming new content and keep my page rated highly (in addition to all the usual ranking methodology - articles, keywords, etc.)

2 questions -
a) Is this a worthwhile thing to do?
b) How do I do it? (In particular, how do I get a feed which relates solely to any keyword/s that I want?)

I look forward to your input.

topsytips · Oct 6, 2008

I would be interested in this also as I would like to have a results page which is updated with latest football and horse racing news....so any help from you old timers would be greatly appreciated!!

*zap* · Oct 6, 2008

First you need to make your own Rss feed or pull the info from a online rss feed
Like
hxxp://blogsearch.google.c0m/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q={diet}&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=atom

note how the keyword is in the ulr copy and paste that just replacing the hxxp and the c0m

Then use a serverside program like "R*S*S M*agician" to rewrite it a little

Should find a copy or R*S*S M*agician in the downloads here

Then find a way of setting all this up to run on a cron job about every 2/3 days (let me know how you did this bit)

The key here i think is getting the rss feed indexed without setting of any dub content filters and then ditching the the content quickly and replacing it

Problem with using a online feed is you have little contol over the content

will it help with seo hell yes

Good luck

Thug Media · Oct 7, 2008

Try this:

Code:

http://www.rss-info.com/en_rssinclude-simple.html

Its a free online rss creator (copy and paste) all you do is add the url of the rss feed you want to use and it gives you the code to copy and paste on your website.

PhiltheBear · Oct 7, 2008

Thank you for those useful posts. Basically a combination of the two results would be good e.g. use the tool at rss-info to create the code but use some kind of variation of zap's query as the url.

It's the filter part that seems to be the problem. I want to use a 'news' feed - but filter it for content. The speed of update isn't that important i.e it won't matter if there isn't a daily update as there may not be a news story in the niche every day - but it would need to be targetted.

forgot · Oct 7, 2008

Use yahoo feeds and rss mix, it will work for sure

gypsydogg · Oct 7, 2008

Say the page was all RSS not altered, would it index or rank at all. I'm assuming it wouldn't be cause it links out to the original source as well as duplicate content.

PhiltheBear · Oct 8, 2008

gypsydogg said:
Say the page was all RSS not altered, would it index or rank at all. I'm assuming it wouldn't be cause it links out to the original source as well as duplicate content.

I believe, that the RSS content is largely irrelevant, it's just the fact that my page would appear to have altered which is important.

uma4guma · Oct 11, 2008

I've never noticed any increase in my search engine placement that I could attribute directly to using rss feeds. On the other hand, I did notice an increase in return visitors to my sites using implementing rss feeds. I would assume that this is a direct result of having fresh content each time they visited.

litenup · Oct 13, 2008

uma4guma said:
I?ve never noticed any increase in my search engine placement that I could attribute directly to using rss feeds. On the other hand, I did notice an increase in return visitors to my sites using implementing rss feeds. I would assume that this is a direct result of having fresh content each time they visited.

That's pretty much of what I've seen also.

Make sure you keep up with as much original content as possible, even invite others to write and post on your site and vice versa.
This can help you to establish some good relevant links

PhiltheBear · Oct 13, 2008

No - I'm still not getting what I want. There's a whole heap of specific content related RSS feeds on all sorts of subjects but they are mainly linked to somebody's blog. I don't want blog content - I want news content - and I want to filter it by my keyword. I can see lots of places where, for example, I could get a news source for 'Sport'. But I want only a part of that - 'Football' for example.

There has to be an easy way - I just don't know what it is....

matapples01 · Oct 13, 2008

Not sure if this is different than what you're getting buuut...

You can get high level feeds on anything here:

HTML:

http://news.yahoo.com/rss

Or drill down and get something more specific like this

HTML:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/rss.xml

birdjuice · Oct 14, 2008

Before you implement RSS feeds on your site, make sure the rest of your onpage SEO is optimized. If you don't have basic shit like a proper sitemap, working on an RSS feed is pointless.

PhiltheBear · Oct 14, 2008

bobfrapples - almost there...

On the

Code:

[url]http://news.yahoo.com/rss[/url]

page there's an option to enter a keyword and receive only the items related to that keyword. (see 'Create your own RSS news feeds') If, for example, I enter 'diet' I get a page

Code:

[url]http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=diet&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt[/url]

What I want to do is to be able to put one (or a specified number) of the items returned on that page into my web page as a "Latest Diet News" paragraph. I'd also like to be able to change the html link for all stories so that clicking on any news story launches a separate window rather than launching the news story replacing my web page.

scb335 · Oct 14, 2008

Here's a site that's 100% made up of content from RSS feeds and ranking #1 in SERPs for it's main keyword, so for those who wonder if rss content can be used with good results: YES!

Code:

site: hxxp://w3.bur*ning*h0*st.c0m
term: web hosting hints

w3 = www and replace 0's with o's and remove *'s in link

That site is running on a script I helped create. The key to ranking well with content from rss feeds is in how the information gets presented, and how many different sources you pull it from.

If you only pull from a single rss feed then you're not creating anything unique and it won't help your rankings much at all, but if you pull small and related chunks of content from multiple rss sources (like a mashup) and display them together all the parts work to make a new whole so-to-speak. It creates something new and highly focused as far as SE's are concerned.

They love mashups, G00gle even offers webmasters tools for creating them, but they hate copy-n-paste or scraper sites that don't turn the feed content into something new or add to it in any way.

matapples01 · Oct 14, 2008

I'm no web design guru and I haven't done this in a while so it's probably a little old school, but:

Go to:

HTML:

http://www.feedforall.com/php-documentation.htm

Click the link at the top that says "running on a local server". It takes you down the page to the "documentation" (all of about 2 paragraphs) to set it all up . Basically you download 2 files to your host from the download link at the left on the page...one is the rss2html.php and the other a template file for the feed layout that the php file references. Go in and tweak the variables (rss feed address, max items...etc) in the rss2html.php in any text editor, per the directions. Then, just go in to your site and enter <?php include('http://www.yoursite.com/rss2html.php'); ?> wherever you want the rss feed to be and you're good to go.

It looks much more intimidating than it is. There are really only a couple variables to edit and you'll be surprised how little work it takes to pull it off.

As far as having the link open in a new window, I'm sure there's some place to change something to target="_blank" but you'll have to poke around a bit for it.

scb335 · Oct 14, 2008

I would add that you take the extra steps while tweaking your output for links opening in new windows to also add rel=nofollow tags to the outbound links, and give them classes so that you can style them with CSS.

The bottom line is you don't want to lose visitors to the rss content if you can avoid it, but you also want to use it within the terms of the source you're pulling it from, meaning you have to give attribution and a link, but those links don't have to look like links for your visitors. They can be black, not underlined, etc. so as not to draw your visitor's attention.

PhiltheBear · Oct 14, 2008

Thanks guys.

The specific problem I have is a site which ranks 2,3,4,5 on Google - the only reason it doesn't have No 1 is that the keywords appear in a forum, which is, of course, regularly updated. I'm working on the basis that if I can include a newsfeed and put a weekly update note for Google I'll be able to displace the No 1.

I think I'm getting there thanks to you all. - I'll let you know......

matapples01 · Oct 14, 2008

scb335 said:
I would add that you take the extra steps while tweaking your output for links opening in new windows to also add rel=nofollow tags to the outbound links, and give them classes so that you can style them with CSS.

The bottom line is you don't want to lose visitors to the rss content if you can avoid it, but you also want to use it within the terms of the source you're pulling it from, meaning you have to give attribution and a link, but those links don't have to look like links for your visitors. They can be black, not underlined, etc. so as not to draw your visitor's attention.

Good points. Some people use RSS feeds as the main content/focus of their site but for the couple sites I've put feeds into I've done it strictly for "fresh" content for datafeed-type sites. With those, I've just put the feed into a narrow scrollable box in the sidebar or a footer box that's too small to see the complete feed titles...etc and draw too much attention to itself but still reaps the rewards up creating fresh content.

RSS feed - does it help?

Junior Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Regular Member

Junior Member

Senior Member

Regular Member

Junior Member

Newbie

Junior Member

Junior Member

Regular Member

Registered Member

Junior Member

BANNED

Regular Member

BANNED

Junior Member

Regular Member

Main Menu

Marketplace

Making Money

BlackHatWorld

Other