Do RSS feeds help SEO?

I have always wondered this, I see many people saying that RSS feeds on their site (normally news feeds) help with seo but how can it if the content is not within the html? The script just shows the ad from another site the same what a google ad shows so how can it help?

Thanks and sorry if it is a dumb question - bit of an SEO newbie here

 

because the bots keep coming.. even if you dont update or have new content on your site. they come.. get some of the news articles and think there is something new.

you get results in the search engines for old news.. most of the times a week old. people find you at keywords of that news. but you dont get more pages or something.. it's something which changes continously depending on the news.

 

I didn't realise that the search engines could spider java script, am I missing something here?

 

Hi JasMate,

SE cannot spider JavaScript. You only require a RSS Feed parser to output the target feed.

A good example of RSS parser is Magpie RSS PHP parser. You need to enter the target xml feed and it will generate output at real time. Meaning that if you are putting up content from DP forums like latest posts, you will have a fresh content page everytime you load the page

To see the script in action, you may want to visit my SEO site (homepage- News) in my sig

Hope it clears your doubt.

 

RSS feeds help SEO, especially if you submit those RSS feeds to feed aggregators and others pick those feeds up for their sites helping to create back links to the site in question. My suggestion is to never provide more than a brief description of your articles in an RSS feed.

 

Any recommended RSS aggregators ?
I update my feed daily on parkour.tv and even added all these cute buttons for easily adding the site to homepages ...

 

Great advice, I was just going to mention this. This technique seems to be picking up a little steam. I have a feeling Feedburners Buzzboost and feed splicing tools will become quite popular in the near future.

 

So sorry but I am still confused
For everyone else that replyed (KLB) I am talking about publishing rss not having rss on other peoples sites, I do understand the benefit of have MY rss on others sites but that is not what I am talking about here.

KCgame thanks for your reply but I am a little confused are you saying that the rss parser will actually write html on your pages so that the engines will be able to read it? Also does it only work on PHP?

Thanks sorry I still haven't caught on

 

I use carp - it's pretty easy and is not java script - I use it both to put my blog on my main intense kids site and just started using it on my web design site with article feeds.

the url is http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/ (popups are annoying but it's worth the effort)

Lisa

 

Yes, the parser will output HTML eventually as long as its a server side scripting. Magpie rss parser only work in PHP but I believe you can find a suitable parser for any platform by googling

All in all, search engine will not know if your content is generated by RSS feeds or other dynamic scripts because they see your page from the client side and the output they see is actually the real content after your parser has processed.

I hope its much clearer now

 

oh sorry, if you put one of those sites on a spider simulator you'll see how the content is spidered - unlike java script

 

That is really cool didn't know that! So for the google search term am I looking for a "free rss parser script"?

Thanks so much for clearing it up, so the as long as its not JS & instead a script that runs off the server it will work! That is great