RSS Feeds and Search Engines

[GuyFromChicago]

I've been considering adding an rss feed to a couple of my sites. I'm not overly familiar with how it's done. Does anyone have any good resources they could point me to?

Also, does and rss feed help/hurt or have any effect at all on how search engines treat your page? Do they view rss content as "fresh"?

Shawn - not sure if this is the best place for this post...please move if you think it fits better in another catagory.

[digitalpoint]

I think Google probably would treat it as fresh content if you had an RSS feed. As far as "how to". Check http://www.hotscripts.com, they have lots of free scripts for dealing with RSS feeds. An example of a site with RSS feeds is http://www.seroundtable.com on the upper left (they have an RSS feed of search engine forums... including this one).

- Shawn

[GuyFromChicago]

Thanks Shawn...I'll check it out.

[rwhetsto]

I use zfeeder for my RSS feeds and I like it, although I am not very experienced with RSS feeds. I have feeds from ESPN for NFL news on my home page and team news from Yahoo! on the left toward the bottom. The cool thing about the Yahoo feed is that I can put in any keyword (eg. Cincinnati Bengals) and it will give recent news articles!

[GuyFromChicago]

I use zfeeder for my RSS feeds and I like it, although I am not very experienced with RSS feeds. I have feeds from ESPN for NFL news on my home page and team news from Yahoo! on the left toward the bottom. The cool thing about the Yahoo feed is that I can put in any keyword (eg. Cincinnati Bengals) and it will give recent news articles!

I'm not very experienced with this either, so the easier the better. At first glance it looks interesting & easy to use. I'm going to take a couple days and check out a few different options. Want to make sure I'll be happy with the final selection.

[compar]

Let us know what your final choice is.

I have used FeedDemon from http://www.bradsoft.com/ just to read a few articles, but I've never tried integrating it into a web site.

[jjdubb]

I've been using zfeeder as well. It's GPL and has an easy to use gui for adding and editting common parameters for the feeds you select.

zfeeder link: http://zvonnews.sourceforge.net/zfeeder.php

[Foxy]

OK I've found the time to follow this thread

Thanks for the info guys - Ive got it up and running at

http://www.ski-france-ok.com/newsfeeds/zfeeder.php

and I will probably pop it in an iframe

but what I really want is to show the weather for this ski site - unfortunately the rss weather example is broke:

- you can import weather for a city by entering the following address in add new,
  Feed URL:   http://laughingmeme.org/weather-rss/country/city.rss
  
  this will use Kellan Elliott-McCrea's (experimental) RSS Weather Service to display
  the weather for country's city: city

Does anyone have some other leads?

France or Europe is good :)

[Foxy]

Also I've got a problem with the subscriptions

I add a new feed and all goes well but then I get an error when adding to the subscription page

Helllllp!

[tsptom]

Has anyone found a good service? I'm looking to add news headlines to my site. I found this service. http://www.newswatcher.com/feeds/feeds.html , I see the word free all over their page but I'm not sure how they actually get paid yet. I can't even tell if this is for your website or just for your personal use.

Thanks

[hans]

Shawn with his nice info box on the Keyword Tracker page
made me "kind of jealous"

i always loved that box - considering i am on a 28 KB dial up
to know at a glance whats new and if of interest to me

i was following THIS thread a while
have no PHP - can get it for free - but have to apply to host-support first
searched and searched during many days many hours many nights !!

and finally got all up and running and submitted since yesterday and many RSS bots crawling
up to many times per hours the RSS news feed

my version runs with SSI

and since i found many info pages but no ONE complete RSS how to
i wrote my own Howto RSS ...

if anyone wants to
- read
- created
- publish
- submit
his own RSS newsfeed within a few hours ( ALL together up to the bots visit ) AND see the RSS bots coming after these few hours
then you may want to have a look at the How to RSS

http://www.kriyayoga.com/how_to/how_to_rss.html

there ARE MANY other ways of doing it
i have NO plans to expanding into dozens or hundreds of own channels
hence i selected an EASY and fast method
simple to implement on ANY server ( all have by now SSI i hope )
and thus the own feed can very easily be inserted at any page of your own site
plus submitted to all RSS news feed directories and RSS Search engines
and hence made available to all webmasters and news services around the globe

for me it was / is JUST another FUN project
i was kind of bored and needed another challenge for a change

just like Shawn with his recent site-thumbnails :)

enjoy and have fun !

[Foxy]

With zfeeder I am having trouble writing/rewriting the subscription list - I have checked my permissions and all is in order - I think

Any ideas anyone? :)

[schlottke]

Hans,

Nice page- a very useful resource!

[hans]

i am pleased to hear that :)

i will add the zfeed (php) how to as soon as I know howto use zfeed
because NOW i have ZERO php experience !!
hence I need to learn that first to know HOWTO feed OTHER
RSS news-feeds - so far its for publishing own feeds.

that will have to wait a short while because these days i am almost fully busy creating
Mother's day "LoveCards"

http://www.kriyayoga.com/pd/LoveCards4.html
to support all men showing our love and appreciation to the female angel part of our creation.

then i work on the zfeed (php) part to be added eventually.
but may be someone else among the forum members/users knows all the basic steps for php NEWBIE and has a full and precise "howto" to for a simple single application such as zfeed ??

[NewComputer]

If I can throw in my two cent. If you use an RSS converter (http://www.feedroll.com/rssviewer/index.php) to transform the XML into javascript, then you will not notice a climb in the engines. The converter is a great way to get people to read your site, but I have never noticed a climb. As for RSS, it will be seen as fresh content.

[Bernard]

Has anyone found a good service? I'm looking to add news headlines to my site. I found this service. http://www.newswatcher.com/feeds/feeds.html , I see the word free all over their page but I'm not sure how they actually get paid yet. I can't even tell if this is for your website or just for your personal use.

Take a look at eMediaWire. They distribute news headlines from PRWeb.com:

http://www.emediawire.com/rss.php

[GuyFromChicago]

Has anyone found a good service? I'm looking to add news headlines to my site. I found this service. http://www.newswatcher.com/feeds/feeds.html , I see the word free all over their page but I'm not sure how they actually get paid yet. I can't even tell if this is for your website or just for your personal use.

Thanks

I went with zfeeder too. Works well and was very easy to set up.

[tsptom]

Has anyone found a good service? I'm looking to add news headlines to my site. I found this service. http://www.newswatcher.com/feeds/feeds.html , I see the word free all over their page but I'm not sure how they actually get paid yet. I can't even tell if this is for your website or just for your personal use.
Well now I know how they get paid. They don't. Here's what you get when you go to their site now...

To our customers, partners and friends:

Mirror Worlds Technologies, Inc. has decided to cease operations effective May 15, 2004. Our products, including Scopeware Vision and NewsWatcher,
have been discontinued and are no longer available for download, purchase, or continuing support.

Inquiries may be directed to lnemeth@scopeware.com.

We thank our customers for their interest and support.

[tsptom]

Take a look at eMediaWire. They distribute news headlines from PRWeb.com:

http://www.emediawire.com/rss.php

Thanks. I'll check it out. Does anyone here else use them? If so, I'd like to see what they look like on your site. Thanks again.

[tsptom]

I went with zfeeder too. Works well and was very easy to set up.
Looks OK Chicago. (I'm looking at your sports forum). So that is free?

[Foxy]

Guy I'm pleased it is working well for you

However I have one problem:

When I go to addnew and enter everything works well until I hit the subscribe button and I get a

"Error opening the subscription list for writing !" which I have checked the permissions and seem to be correct.

Any clues? :)

[hergo]

I use magpierss.

I just modified a sample script that came with it and now include them into my php files. Works well.

[xml]

Hmm perfect opportunity to plug a site of mine:

Check it out: news search engine (http://www.feedsfarm.com/), search for the news u desire, syndicate them in RSS 1, 2 and Atom formats.

:)

[notepage]

I've been considering adding an rss feed to a couple of my sites. I'm not overly familiar with how it's done. Does anyone have any good resources they could point me to?

Also, does and rss feed help/hurt or have any effect at all on how search engines treat your page? Do they view rss content as "fresh"?

Shawn - not sure if this is the best place for this post...please move if you think it fits better in another catagory.


As far as resources try http://www.rss-specifications.com there are articles that detail displaying rss and creating rss feeds.
If you display rss on your site using java it is unlikely that the search engines will see it as fresh content. Having a feed that contains your content will likely bring your traffic from other sources.
HTH
S. Housley
NotePage, Inc.
http://www.notepage.net