Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
RSS feeds- What are the secrets to getting them, and the links inside then, indexed and counted for SEO purposes?
-
RSS feeds, at least on paper, should be a great way to build backlinks and boost rankings. They are also very seductive from a link-builder's point of view- free, easy to create, allows you to specifiy anchor text, etc. There are even several SEO articles, anda few products, extolling the virtues of RSS for SEO puposes.
However, I hear anecdotedly that they are extremely ineffective in getting their internal links indexed. And my success rate has been abysmal- perhaps 15% have ever been indexed,and so far, I havenever seem Google show an RSS feed as a source for a backlink. I have even thrown some token backlinks against RSS feeds to see if that helped in getting them indexed, but even that has a very low success rate.
I recently read a blog post saying that Google "hates aRSS feeds" and "rarely spiders perhaps the first link or two." Yet there are many SEO advocates who claim that RSS feeds are a great untapped resource for SEO. I am rather befuddled.
Has anyone "crackedthe code" onhow to get them,and the links that they contain, indexed and helping rankings?
-
Actually, RSS feeds are also used as a defensive method of link building. YOAST makes a plugin for Wordpress that everyone should use (if they use wordpress), one of the features is inserting text and links into your RSS feed.
Obnoxious scraper sites use RSS feeds to populate their websites, they do not monitor the content, its all automated. By putting links and a citation in your RSS feeds, this lets you at least get a little benefit from their theft of your content.
Link Explorer shows feedburner and a couple other RSS agg sites as high value referring sites.
-
why would anyone need this service? I believe the original question was RSS feeds from the site owner being indexed? RSS feeds should be submitted too google webmaster tools to be index by google and Bing offers a similar service too webmasters, After initial submission the webmaster never has to submit again?
If I wanted to push my content using RSS feeds then I would use Ping.fm to push my content and links to third party sites and social media.......
I am at a loss why a webmaster would use the linkilecious site?
-
Really detailed overlook. Nice touching on everything.
-
If I understand the question correctly you would like your content to be spread to other sites through rss feeds and then be indexed there with a backlink to your site?
Number 1: there must be a reason for the other site to index and create a backlink to your site.
Number 2: these links are almost always "no follow" and therefore need to reach a very high amount of links to be of any real use for you if you want to affect the serp.
eg: You submit your site to several "ping" sites of your choosing that index certain content and then when you publish a new story these sites get pinged from your cms and a nofollow backlink is created for you on that site,
Just make certain that these sites that you ping actually has good content and have fills a puropose for the visitors.
A better way though to keep control over the material is to create an own site running wordpress where you write about your site as a blog. Just put a news section in a sidebar and put your RSS feed in there. wordpress sites are indexed extremly fast and when you own the site you can choose to use follow links in the section on the blog site.
This should lead to a faster indexing and you create backlinks that have a function and furthermore you own the site linking to you primary site.
A short summary:
RSS feeds are good to spread content and attract visitors. They're not a quick way to get backlinks.
-
We use an RSS feed for new product lists. We may have some lag time before a new product gets put in a category and able to be browsed to on our site. The RSS feed gives a few days head start getting these new products into the search engines. We redirect all RSS links back to the main site links that include canonical tags for the main product pages.
-
RSS should be designed primarily for your users and secondly to syndicate out using RSS Aggregators to distribute parts of your content (headlines and URLS)
Be careful about how much of the article content you include within the RSS Feed themselves. Whilst is it good for the user to include the full article within the feed by doing so you are also giving scrapers an an easy time to reproduce your content and thus might end up being penalising for duplicate content even though you are the original source (I've seen this happen).
I've used two techniques in the past the first was to publish a short additional body that contain a call to action to follow the link to the original article stub. I then switched to publishing the full content within the feed just for my users but I am thinking about going changing it again and publishing part of the content within the feed and then have a call to action for the reader to visit my site for the full article which will hopefully increase CTR on the feed whilst reducing the content duplication issue
-
The link building power of rss feeds is simply in getting other sites to feature and link to your content via rss. There would be no utility for a bot to crawl your feed stand alone, it would rather just look at the content itself. Try submitting your feed to rss directories or having other webmasters feature your feed on their site. I believe several web 2.0 sites like squid allow for feed publishing as well. Hope that helps.
-
Sorry, I'm a little confused as well. Why would you want people linking to your RSS feed instead of your original posts? Why would you even want the RSS feed to be indexed and returned in search results rather than the original posts? Wouldn't Google want to link people to the original post vs. the RSS feed? Aren't RSS feeds supposed to be a feed of content already on your site... so I don't see why Google would have much of an incentive to spider it or return it in search results?
-
You load links into it, it then creates an RSS feed on their end that gets pinged. You can load any kind of link into it and it'll ping them.
-
Thanks, but Linklicious turns links into RSS feeds- it doesn't help get the RSS feeds, or their internal links, to get indexed as far as I know. Am I not understanding the service correctly?
-
This service works well, I've personally tested it: http://linklicious.me/
Try that or another pinging service, there are a ton of them out there.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Google Indexing Feedburner Links???
I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10 -
Getting Google to Correct a Misspelled Site Link...Help!
My company website recently got its site links in google search... WooHoo! However, when you type TECHeGO into Google Search one of the links is spelled incorrectly. Instead of 'CONversion Optimization' its 'COversion Optimization'. At first I thought there was a misspelling on that page somewhere but there is not and have come to the conclusion that Google has made a mistake. I know that I can block the page in webmaster tools (No Thanks) but how in the crap can I get them to correct the spelling when no one really knows how to get them to appear in the first place? Riddle Me That Folks! sitelink.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TECHeGO0
