RSS, Freshness of Content

[dcristo]

It's been all the talk of late that syndicating RSS feeds on your site is very beneficial to your search engine rankings due to the freshness of the content, which the SEs supposedly love. However, something Im unsure about... is the freshness of the content a domain specific or page based specific thing? Integrating a RSS feed on the homepage of a site would be very impractical for most sites, especially when you have a fairly nichey site and a very general rss feed, it just wouldnt look right. If you implement the RSS feed on an internal page of your domain, is it just the internal page with the feed on it benefited, or do the SEs see the whole domain as being fresh and all your site pages are benefited?

[jimrthy]

I'm experimenting with this now, but I haven't been doing it long enough to come up with any hard numbers. Not that we can ever come up with definitive results.

[Labcoat88]

I'm interested in this thread too... just set up an RSS feed over the weekend, and it's been indexed already, but I suppose it will be a while (if at all) to determine if it has SEO benefits at all. At least it gives users something to 'bookmark' (syndicate the feed) if they're interested...

[Yukio]

Hmm, SEO ranks for my site went up considerably after I implemented a live RSS feed from BLOGGER into my site itself... I'm not ranked 1 in most of my target keyterms... I recall reading this article on seochat as well I believe. However, my SEO ranks were at the time increasing anyway because I was optimizing my site... so it's not really definite.

[dcristo]

I'm interested in this thread too... just set up an RSS feed over the weekend, and it's been indexed already, but I suppose it will be a while (if at all) to determine if it has SEO benefits at all. At least it gives users something to 'bookmark' (syndicate the feed) if they're interested...

Im thinking the search engine ranking benefit would be a page based thing... however this is a complete guess without any evidence to back it up. With your experiment have you placed the feed on the home page or some other internal page of your site?

[Labcoat88]

Im thinking the search engine ranking benefit would be a page based thing... however this is a complete guess without any evidence to back it up. With your experiment have you placed the feed on the home page or some other internal page of your site?

Both... there's a link to the RSS file on all pages (footer nav), and then more explicitly from several content pages inside the site.

[Voasi]

I think it's a page by page case. If you have feeds on each page, continually rotating the content, then Google will continue re-indexing the page.

I have a few sites where I only have one link pointing to the homepage. I have an RSS feed on the homepage. Google comes to the homepage everyday, but hasn't indexed any internal pages. It's the same for all the other sites I've done this with.

This also goes in part of getting incoming links. The more links your site achieves/pursues/buys, the more deeper the crawlers will go. Once you get those internal pages indexed and have an RSS feed syndicating on it, the page will get re-indexed much more frequently.

[dcristo]

I think it's a page by page case. If you have feeds on each page, continually rotating the content, then Google will continue re-indexing the page.

I have a few sites where I only have one link pointing to the homepage. I have an RSS feed on the homepage. Google comes to the homepage everyday, but hasn't indexed any internal pages. It's the same for all the other sites I've done this with.

This also goes in part of getting incoming links. The more links your site achieves/pursues/buys, the more deeper the crawlers will go. Once you get those internal pages indexed and have an RSS feed syndicating on it, the page will get re-indexed much more frequently.

Much appreciated :)

From now on it maybe wise for me to start building php based sites.

[donnareed]

The optimum solution would then be to determine how many pages deep the spiders crawl your site on average- say it's 5 pages.

OK, now let's say that your site has 100 pages. If you set up 20 pages to run RSS feeds on, then theoretically your entire site should get spidered reasonably frequently.

Does this make sense?

[dcristo]

The optimum solution would then be to determine how many pages deep the spiders crawl your site on average- say it's 5 pages.

OK, now let's say that your site has 100 pages. If you set up 20 pages to run RSS feeds on, then theoretically your entire site should get spidered reasonably frequently.

Does this make sense?

Sure does. I guess one has to figure out, when do you draw the line when it comes to wanting to SEO your site and usability. Having a RSS feed on every page of your site isnt very practical, especially if its a very general feed.

[Cyclops]

Interesting thread.......if you place an RSS feed on every page would it take care of duplicate content problems.

I'm thinking this from an affiliate point of view where the content will be the same on many sites pages.

Place some affiliate text or a banner on a page, add an RSS feed and, viola, no duplicate content issue, ??