RSS Feeds - Any SEO Benefits?

Hi,

It has been suggested to me that I should consider adding an RSS feed to my ecomerce site because it will help feed search engines with regular up todate content from my site and thus potentially improve the indexing and SERP of my site.

My web master has quoted me £150 to add an RSS feed, which I feel is reasonable.

However, what I would like to know is would the addition of an RSS feed be of sufficient benefit to merit the cost of adding it?

Thanks

Jimbob

 

No, don't spend that money.

Creating an RSS feed based on your product catalog is not likely to improve your search engine rankings.

There are 2 benefits to RSS in terms of SEO:

1) By embedding an RSS feed on your site you would have page content that changes more regularly. This means Google recognises that your site needs to be crawled more often in ordered to catch the latest on your website. The benefit of this is minor, Google will visit more often, but it won't improve rankings, it just means that when you add something new it will get listed in Google faster. In any case, this is not what you intend to do by the sounds of what you're describing.

2) You create a feed and make sure that the feed contains within a link back to your website. There is then 2 benefits of this:

1)Your content will become available on google blog search and other aggregators. Blog owners will often search other peoples feeds using something like "google blog search" and should they find anything interesting in your feed they will reference to it and sometimes link back to your website to give you credit. This works if your site contains unique and interesting articles, but you on the other hand will be feeding products... not much interesting there. People thus will not be "syndicating" your feed or linking back.

2) There are people that create many 1000's of sites automatically, get them indexed and try to make a revenue from whatever traffic they get. To do this efficiently they need lots of content for their websites, one way of obataining this content automatically is to grab it from various feeds found through "google blog search" or other content aggregators; swap around the words to make it unique and publish it, if it originated from your feed there will be a link back to your site. However once again, since your content is not rich with keywords it's unlikely to get picked up in this way.

In short, this isn't going to help your rankings. Do not pay £150 for it.

 

I am not sure if an RSS feed is really worth 150 pounds But I would recommend you to have one if you post new products very often. It makes a lot of sense for content based sites, may not be all that useful for an ecommerce site unless there are regular updates and new pages being added.

 

Great reply.

Thanks (added to reputation)

 

Nice post, but you forgot to mention rss directories. These will give direct links to your posts using the title as anchor text (considered extremely valuable by some people), though (if you ask me) it is like peeing in your pants. It will make your site hot for a while, but you will certainly drop back again (usually after a half days time).