How To Use RSS Correctly
There is no doubt in my mind that RSS is here to stay. RSS is a simple and effective means of communicating your message to your visitors without invading their privacy or spamming them. It has many benefits over email and there have been many reports of the death of email due to the continual rise of mass spamming and non delivery due to spam filters. By no means is email dead, it is still the best personal communication method besides picking up the phone. It's just that RSS does some things much better than email. I have been informing and educating webmasters about RSS since I first discovered the potential of this medium. A whole industry has now grown up around RSS and now there are directories that specialise in listing RSS feeds and tools to help you create RSS feeds. Everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon and everybody seems to have their own opinions about how RSS should be used. Even Google has joined in to offer adsense in RSS feeds. The problem I see is that improper use of RSS may well send RSS the way of email. Currently it seems that if you publish an RSS feed the contents of that feed seem to be considered public domain. The reasons for this is, I believe, to do with the way content is packaged in RSS, this makes the content easy to syndicate. It is not that difficult to create a script or desktop application to strip out the content of RSS feeds and publish them on someone else's website. There is even a few applications being sold for just this purpose. This has lead to what I consider improper use of RSS feeds to spam the search engines, this seems to be aimed particularly at Google. Although not yet widespread yet many webmasters are cottoning on to the fact that they can get easy content for their websites without putting in much effort. Although off hand this may not seem detrimental to you, consider the long term consequences. Your feed copied hundreds if not thousands of times and no back links to your site as the links have been stripped. What if Google decides to penalise due to duplicate content, the consequences could be that your site is dropped from Googles listings. After considering such a scenario I have come up with a few suggestions. Firstly only publish a teaser paragraph in your feed that links back to the main article. Although some may disagree with me as they prefer the full article in the feed, I truly believe RSS is better suited to notification type messages. Secondly you can publish some terms in your feed which states that the contents are personal use only and you should be contacted for syndication rights. While this will not stop those determined to copy the content of your RSS feed it will help raise awareness of the issue. Allan is the webmaster at NewsNiche an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.
Related News
Fast Talk Response - - Fast Company
Fast Talk Response -Fast Company -Aug 20, 2008... in the last year to 18 mos. is because it has all the benefits of blogging (RSS,commenting,sharing,tagging,bookmarking) but none of the hassles. ... |
Tips On Blogging For Dollars - Corsavoo.com
Lessons from the India USA Nuclear deal - indiainteracts.com
Lessons from the India USA Nuclear dealindiainteracts.com, India -Sep 6, 2008... September 6th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. ... |
Pro-Blogger - How to have a Constant Stream of Blogging Ideas - PR CannaZine (press release)
Food blogging: Pumpkin baked ziti with caramelized onions and sage ... - Feministe
Getting Sucked Into Social Networking - Corsavoo.com
Getting Sucked Into Social NetworkingCorsavoo.com, France -Sep 6, 2008When you post blogs or files in your account, everyone from your network of friends will be informed of the update through RSS feeds. ... |
E-Mail marketing and blogging provider iContact gets $5 million in ... - InternetRetailer.com
Google says Goodbye to RSS, Hello to Followers - Appscout
Travel 2.0 marketing services for hotels launched - m-Travel.com
9 Things To Think About When Planning An Executive Blog - Social Computing Magazine
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It even surprised me.
Yes, even though I have been pointing out the possibility since July, and was forced by demand to release my study findings before my book was even half finished, I was shocked when I heard the news as well.
You see, I was sure we were at least a year off from this glorious day.
The News
Yahoo has had a little facelift, which you've probably read about by now. The real news is more important for your site - the "My Yahoo!" page looks different too.
On September 28, 2004, surfers who logged in to their personalized Yahoo area saw an announcement explaining the RSS and Atom files that show updated information to a website as content feeds, effectively pushing news feeds into the mainstream.
The new look to this section of Yahoo was presented as a full page ad to every single account holder upon first log in that day, and even now, there remains a notice posted.
When I logged into my page in the "My Yahoo!" section, I saw a big difference in the number of feeds left to choose from, as well as in the way they were presented.
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Best results aren't as easy as submitting your feed now, but you're still within the window of opportunity - if you do it properly.
What the News Could Mean For Your Site If You Act Now
One of my clients recently called this "the back door into Yahoo". Whether that statement is accurate as far as getting included, or receiving an increase in rankings within Yahoo's search engine via your feed, depends on your site, and whether you create your feed correctly.
If you could use a daily stream of traffic from even a small portion of Yahoo's estimated 20 million users, this could be your final wake-up call. You'll want to learn how to create a feed that gets well listed immediately.
Currently, the RSS module boasts "150,000 sources". Yahoo will still need hundreds, perhaps thousands more, even if it only intends to list the "creme de la creme" of the submissions it gets. Being in that group is as easy as submitting your feed.
Being at the top of the list isn't. However, you're still within the window of opportunity if you take the time to learn how to do this properly. You can get free details on how to do that at helpmerss.com .
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If I had to guess, I'd say all signs point to yes. When that happens, Yahoo's RSS/Atom directory will likely contain only those who added their feeds early. New feeds seeking to be included will probably face stricter standards.
If you don't have one yet don't worry, because it's never been easier to make one. If you can cut and paste, there are tools all over the Net that will show you how- some will even generate the file for you.
However, there are still certain guidelines you need to follow with your feed to get a good result out of Yahoo - it's not as simple as adding your feed now that there are more competing listings.
Yahoo is still accepting new sources for RSS feeds. Readers of my last book state that they are getting excellent results following my instructions, though initial inclusion no longer occurs at the same rate. Plenty of markets have few feeds available, or none at all. Your site could fill that void.
That means you still have a chance at a first page ranking. The traffic I get on a daily basis from My Yahoo readers alone sounds like I just like to brag.
And I do, but that's hardly the point.
The point is, there's no place you can even go to buy the caliber of exposure to the quality of audience that reads feeds. The typical audience that accesses information by feed are also blog readers. A study this summer estimated that the 69.3% of blog readers are aged 29-50, and that 40% of this audience are people who have household incomes greater than $90,000.
The type of surfer that would subscribe to your feed has pre-qualified themselves as a lead, with a certain level of understanding and interest in your topic, often on a professional level. And if you don't spend every post hitting them over the head with your sales pitch, they can be both loyal and interactive.
(If you do, they'll unsubscribe from your feed faster than you can spell s-p-a-m.)
And if you're in the business of providing information you can use, in a way that shows how you can solve their problem, it's like preaching to the converted. If your product solves their problem, and you show that you deserve the trust of this subscriber, you'll also find the route to a sale an increasingly downward slope.
The bottom line - this is the power surfer's favorite toy. And if your content appeals to them, you need to learn how to play.
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RSS to Javascript.
By far the easiest method is to use client side javascript to parse and display the headlines on your site. To achieve this all you need to do is cut and paste some HTML or javascript code into the web page where you want the RSS feed headlines to display.
To achieve this there are several sites that offer a free service that will allow you to select a few options to choose your feed source and display formatting parameters. You will then be presented with some javascript code that you can cut and paste into your website.
Now before I give you the address of the sites that offer this service freely there are a few points I need to clarify with you. Although you will achieve your goal of displaying dynamic content on your site in a few short minutes there are some downsides to this method.
Javascript is not search engine friendly.
As you may or may not already know, javascript is not visible to search engine spiders. They will not see the RSS feed you have parsed into your site and so this will not benefit you if you are doing this to better your search engine rankings.
You are using a third party service.
The second potential downside is that although the javascript is on your site you are actually calling a script on another server. This could lead to a couple of potential problems. If the server is busy it will mean the news feed will take longer to display on your site. The other point is if the third party server fails or disappears altogether then your feed will not be displayed at all.
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Feed2JS
RSS2HTML
RSS-to-Javascript
FeedSweep
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