R

RSS – (Syndicated Content)

There are actually many great uses for RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Website Publishers & especially Blog owners should use RSS feeds in their pages to give

fresh, on-topic content to their readers each day without having to lift a finger. Alternatively, they can offer their own RSS feed to other webmasters so that those other sites can publish their site content elsewhere (with a link back to their site, naturally.)

Your visitors will like having the fresh industry news there at a glance. I know that I certainly appreciate my Yahoo! news start page portal, which is nothing but 50 RSS Feeds all crammed together.

For a few years now we’ve been able to show RSS feeds from our own sites, plugging in various RSS Feeds to our web pages to constantly update themselves, so our websites are always new and up-to-date looking for our visitors. Here are two great resources to start learning how to do so:

Alternatively, any webmaster or Blog runner that puts out a fair amount of content (weekly posts or more frequently) can ‘syndicate’ it with RSS by simply creating an XML feed file and posting it on one of the many varies RSS directories. (http://www.syndic8.com is one of the largest, but again there are hundreds of these directories, and many are themed.)

It’s important to note that there is no point building an entire site out of RSS Feeds, because there would be no original content on your site. With no original content, Search Engines like Google won’t see anything on your site worth pointing to. RSS Feeds technically don’t belong to your site; they only belong to the originator of the feed. All the rest of the people who display that feed are using scraps of duplicate content, which Google doesn’t count towards your page’s worth. But don’t worry, there is a big upside to RSS publishing; these feeds still have keywords in them to match to contextual-matching programs like AdSense, so RSS Feeds can help bring up your AdSense click value if used properly. This means that feeds are great tools for AdSense Publishers, as long as they don’t try to make the feeds into the majority of that site’s content.