Re: Placing and promoting RSS feeds

Ignoramus31199 wrote:

I created four RSS news feeds for my site. They are there and they
seem to work. No one can see them because I am not yet promoting them
in any way. I know where they are, so I am subscribed to them to see if
they work.

These feeds are script driven and are fed from a special SQL
table. The table is populated when certain content is added or
deleted.

The RSS feeds are only useful for users of my site. They are of no
interest to people who do not intend to use my site (such as answering
math questions from children).

I heard that having RSS feed is viewed favorably by internet gods such
as google. Is that true?

Regardless, where should I place links to my feeds? Right now I
created a special subdirectory with a single page listing my RSS feeds,
with links to the feed XML files.

Is that good enough? Should I bother with adding RSS tag to the
headers of some of my pages? They do it at craigslist:

http://chicago.craigslist.org/tls/

if you look at headers, you will see an "alternate link" tag
mentioning the rss feed. That could fit into some of the pages on my
site (the pages that present updated information). Should I do it?

any thoughts?

I am an RSS rookie, I learned about RSS yesterday, more or less. I
knew what it was for, before, but that was it.

thanks

Hi again,

The first thing to check is whether broken links are contained in the feeds
and whether the feeds are flexible enough to index entire sections of the
site (e.g. by changing LIMIT in the SQL query).

RSS feeds on their own can imply that a site is technologically advanced and
hence worth admiring and sending visitors to. With blogging tools, however,
I am not sure how true this is anymore. Google site maps only bring up
skepticism among members of this group (alt.internet.search-engines) so I
suggest you look at posts from the past week.

Like you, I also created one page which lists all feeds so that a user can
choose the most suitable feed/s (press the orange XML in my front page to
see this page). Moreover, I added the most relevant feeds to the header of
all HTML files in order to benefit from Firefox Live Bookmark and its
subscribers (Internet Explorer 7 will soon catch up on that). If you are
interested, I can send you my Linux scripts which add the links recursively
in command-line mode.

RSS are the way to go as far as I can tell. I slowly accumulate subscribers
and I believe that you must go on the RSS 'wagon' as soon as possible. RSS
support is growing exponentially and once visitors get overloaded in terms
of number of subscriptions, they no longer have an appetite for them. You
must entice them as soon as they are introduced to RSS so hurry and
promote. Largely owing to RSS, John Bokma is able to attract ~3,000
visitors a day.

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com

Thanks. I am not sure if I want to have an RSS header on all
pages. Since I use a XML generating script and an SQL table, I have
quite a bit of flexibility and I can have a RSS feed for all kind of
logically separate entity. I have not decided what to do.

My pages are generated on the fly, so I think that your mode of
script use would be different from mine.

I have the same situation, all my pages generated dynamically. So each
page has a diffeent rss feed (see example below my sig). But then the
script that generates that page also generates the appropriate link to
the rss feed for that page. Why would that not work for you?

Seth Russell
www.speaktomecatalog.com/room.php?tag=xxx
rss feed for the xxx catagory
www.speaktomecatalog.com/rss.xml?tag=xxx

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 17:07:00 +0100, Roy Schestowitz
<newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote:

RSS feeds on their own can imply that a site is technologically advanced and
hence worth admiring and sending visitors to. With blogging tools, however,
I am not sure how true this is anymore. Google site maps only bring up
skepticism among members of this group (alt.internet.search-engines) so I
suggest you look at posts from the past week.

Are you saying that other groups like the idea?

RSS are the way to go as far as I can tell. I slowly accumulate subscribers
and I believe that you must go on the RSS 'wagon' as soon as possible. RSS
support is growing exponentially and once visitors get overloaded in terms
of number of subscriptions, they no longer have an appetite for them. You
must entice them as soon as they are introduced to RSS so hurry and
promote. Largely owing to RSS, John Bokma is able to attract ~3,000
visitors a day.

Largely owing to the CONTENT of those RSS's, let's not get confused
here.

BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk/ seo (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
seo that watches the river flow...
--

If you are having problems with malformed feeds not validating you can pull the
feed into FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com it will likely fix it for you. If
you want to take the easy road you could use it for creation.

A few other tips for promoting feeds can be found at:

http://www.rss-specifications.com/steps-create-rss.htm

http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-seo.htm


Best of luck
Joe

Big Bill wrote:

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 17:07:00 +0100, Roy Schestowitz
newsgroups (AT) schestowitz (DOT) com> wrote:

RSS feeds on their own can imply that a site is technologically advanced
and hence worth admiring and sending visitors to. With blogging tools,
however, I am not sure how true this is anymore. Google site maps only
bring up skepticism among members of this group
(alt.internet.search-engines) so I suggest you look at posts from the past
week.

Are you saying that other groups like the idea?

RSS are the way to go as far as I can tell. I slowly accumulate
subscribers and I believe that you must go on the RSS 'wagon' as soon as
possible. RSS support is growing exponentially and once visitors get
overloaded in terms of number of subscriptions, they no longer have an
appetite for them. You must entice them as soon as they are introduced to
RSS so hurry and promote. Largely owing to RSS, John Bokma is able to
attract ~3,000 visitors a day.

Largely owing to the CONTENT of those RSS's, let's not get confused
here.

I don't know if other group acknowledge and brace Google site maps. I
haven't come across a thread on the subject elsewhere. It was mentioned in
the WordPress mailing lists, but only from a technical point-of-view, no
criticism involved.

I think that the pairing between URL and date is quite powerful. It probably
means quicker indexing of new pages, which is important if you deliver news
and need SERP ranks to improve overnight.

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com

Ignoramus31199 wrote:

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 19:24:33 GMT, Big Bill <kruse (AT) cityscape (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

Largely owing to the CONTENT of those RSS's, let's not get confused
here.


That's an excellent point. It's the content of RSS that matters
(beside the possibility thet SE's like merely having an RSS).

Subscribers would need a good reason to unsubscribe (if they ever will). It
is easier to just skip a subscribed-to feed that keeps updating. Removal is
done actively and people are lazy or reluctant, so don't be alarmed. Many
feeds that I subscribed to are shaded (hidden in deeper levels of the tree)
so I don't read them unless I have a good reason to do so.

From search engines point-of-view, the handling should be similar to that of
standard Web pages.

My RSS is designed to inform users of my site of new content submitted
by other users, to which the subscribers could do something. For
example, subscribers could be alerted that a new math problem was
submitted, and then go and solve it.

I have a few very intelligent math addicts on my site who love solving
submitted problems just for fun. All I am trying to do is to make it
as fun and addictive as possible.

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com