RSS feeds and SEO

[Dealster]

Everyone says that by keeping content fresh without using Java Scripts, but with RSS feeds, it makes your site more spider friendly. Does anyone know if it matters whether the RSS feeds are placed above or below the fold? Thanks in advance!

Dealster

[groundctrl]

RSS should not, in and of itself, increase SERPs. what it SHOULD increase is return subscribers, who are more likely to grab a feed if they like the page they're on.

keeping content fresh, though, should increase SERPs, because engines will see that it's an active site, etc.

[POLiSH]

Originally Posted by groundctrl

RSS should not, in and of itself, increase SERPs. what it SHOULD increase is return subscribers, who are more likely to grab a feed if they like the page they're on.

keeping content fresh, though, should increase SERPs, because engines will see that it's an active site, etc.

Your right on the button

[Liquiteq]

To determine whether it is going to spider your "new / changed content", the servers response to the last update of each file is used. RSS will increase the crawl rate, as it would need to crawl your site before being aware of any updates.

This discussion can get very deep, but to all intents and purposes, if you wish to be crawled regularly, it needs to appear that the content had a "hard update".

What about Content Management Systems? Well this is where the XML sitemap can provide some serious benefits. Although no files are directly updated, you make google aware of the frequency of change, and ping where necessary. It's not a good idea to ping too frequently, but is acceptable to run it on a cron if you do have regularly updated content.

This technique can be applied to your pages with nested RSS, but i would strongly suggest against it.

Content is King, and should be unique and informative.

[VirtualT]

so a cron script to "touch" all your files could achieve the same thing

[Liquiteq]

It could, but that's not what I meant. Doing Gping on cron can prove beneficial if ur site is regularly updated, and if it doesnt already ping G, Y!, Ask etc. as soon as a page is added.

[tonyfloyd]

how do u do Gping?...do u also suggest technorati ping?

[Liquiteq]

Hi Tony,

Pings will be of the following format:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

To note but a few examples.

This is specifically for application to a site that has a healthy growth rate, and regularly updated content.

P.S. Don't get ping happy on this.. it'll result in being penalized.

[tonyfloyd]

how do u do Gping?...do u also suggest technorati ping?

[Liquiteq]

Google Ping is mentioned above, and technorati ping is geared more towards the use of blogs. With a normal site, although it may have dynamic content on the home page, it will still display mostly the same content. A blog generally diplays mostly new content on the home page. This is where the benefit of bookmark pings come in.

[webd]

Originally Posted by tonyfloyd

how do u do Gping?...do u also suggest technorati ping?

If you have a blog, then ping Technorati. You can ping Technorati through pingomatic.com. To ping Google's blog search separately see this page:
http://www.google.com/help/blogsearc...t_pinging.html