RSS, what's the big Poop?

[Rebirth Studios]

I guess I'm a little confused about the whole RSS thing...

RSS is content from someone's feed which you can use to populate your site with fresh content. The SE's love this regular updating of pages, but since the content is "duplicate," why is RSS so highly touted if everyone has the same thing?

Thanks

[Dan Grossman]

RSS's primary use is not to provide content for websites. It's to push updates to blog and news readers. Most RSS feeds are blog feeds, which unless you're given explicit permission, you cannot use to "populate your site". That would be copyright infringement.

[stymiee]

why is RSS so highly touted if everyone has the same thing?

Because they don't know any better. These are the same people who look for short cuts to ranking well and will believe anything you tell them as long as it is quick and easy.

[twalters84]

Hey there,

RSS feeds are great for traffic.

If you have these feeds on your site, your visitors can subscribe to them. That means when you update your content, that gets sent to them. It gives them a reason to come back to your website.

There are hundreds of RSS directories you can submit your feeds to.

I would not worry about duplicate content. If your feed validates as RSS, then I am prettty sure google and yahoo crawlers have advanced far enough to differentiate RSS feeds from the main content on your website.

Sincerely,
Travis Walters

[Struggling]

I have created my rss feed and it is at the following address

http://www.davidbrown dot com/davidbrownrssfeed.rss

Now this might sound a really stupid question but how do i update it??? I have made a couple of changes and re uploaded it to my website. Will this count as an update?? Or do i have to recreate the whole feed again??? Also what is the best way to subscribe to my feed so that i can see how it works???

I have submitted my feed to various rss feed sites as well.

Cheers

[Dan Grossman]

An RSS feed is not supposed to be a site map. You seem to be missing the point by manually creating one linking to old static pages. If you have a part of your site which is updated regularly and you want to allow people to subscribe to updates via RSS, then that part of the site should be programmed to generate and update the feed automatically.

You should never change items in the feed. That's not an update. That's just misuse of the technology. Updates are new feed items corresponding to new information you want subscribers to receive. It's a push mechanism. A feed reader checks for new posts in the feed to notify the subscriber of.

Submitting it to feed directories when you don't know what it is or if it even works is really shady.

[Dan Schulz]

As my colleague said, an RSS feed's primary purpose is to provide people with updates to your Web site as a complimentary technology. If you're going to update a feed by hand, you should just add the latest "update" (like a news article, blog entry and so forth) instead of linking to old static pages (which is what a site map does best).

[Struggling]

Sorry I have missed understood the rss feed thing. It was a genuine mistake.

This is what i though you did you created a feed page and on that page you created a link to the page that you were regularly updating.

In our case the news and case studies page. Our aim is to update these pages a couple of times a month. Then once we had updated one of these pages we changed our feed page to mention the change and then people who subsribed to our feed would see we had changed a page and come and look at the appropiate page.

Could you please explain to me how it should of been done, i am not an expert by a long way and I have been put in charge of this as we have no one else and can't afford to pay anyone to do this kind of stuff and I juts read a few tutorials (but obviously read them wrong)

Cheers for any advice

[Rebirth Studios]

Most RSS feeds are blog feeds, which unless you're given explicit permission, you cannot use to "populate your site". That would be copyright infringement.

This makes a lot of sense, but it seems like a lot of folks do this from syndicated sites like Newspapers, Reuters, and Other Informational Sites.

I was thinking about doing it for some news/events pages we have at my company, but the copyright issue would be one we wouldn't skirt. The thought here would be more towards automating the pages and saving work costs than actually trying to scheme from an SEO perspective.

[Dan Grossman]

This makes a lot of sense, but it seems like a lot of folks do this from syndicated sites like Newspapers, Reuters, and Other Informational Sites.

I was thinking about doing it for some news/events pages we have at my company, but the copyright issue would be one we wouldn't skirt. The thought here would be more towards automating the pages and saving work costs than actually trying to scheme from an SEO perspective.

The reason that's common is because many of the news sites are giving permission. For example, here's BBC's page which gives permission to use their RSS feed on a website as long as you include some attribution text:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm#mysite

[Rebirth Studios]

Cool, thanks