Google + RSS Feeds

Hi Everyone,

I am interested in adding some RSS feeds to my website and was wondering what people's experience has been with RSS affecting the SEO process.

Does Googlebot spider RSS feeds? Does it help attract unique visitors? What are the ups and downs?

Any input would be apprecaited.

Thanks,

Todd

 

I had some trouble with that. I created a site, which had almost all content pulled from RSS, and it tripped the duplicate content flag and dropped in ranking. BE carefull, make sure you have some unique content there as well.

 

svato,

was your site's content only RSS feeds and nothing else? did you have any unique content?

 

Well... I did one big mistake. The structure was like this:
- homepage
- one more page linked from homepage
- 2 more large sections, but both were on subdomains (e.g. photos.svato.com)

Therefore for Google, the site consisted from 2 pages only, and treated the subdomain content as separate sites.

What happened then:
I inserted RSS only (pretty much 100% of the content) on the homepage. It consisted of tech articles from Yaho/CNet etc.
Next time G spidered my site, I shot up to #2. Two days later - I dropped and was nowehere to be found (I could be still found by searching for the domain name though).

Lessons to learn:
- be careful with subdomains
- try to have some unique content, do not overuse the RSS

But then again - maybe I dropped becasue my content changed and it was not relevant for the serach term any more. I was not banned, the site only dropped in results...

I got rid of the subdomains and it's coming slowly back up now...

 

were your feeds javascript based or server-side based?

 

It was PHP, which means that for Google it was pure HTML.

I don't want to scare you though, as long as you have some original content there and don't use any other obscure techniquest, I think you should be allright.

As for MSN/Yahoo - they had never had problems with my RSS. Only Google gave me trouble.

 

Would limiting the number of items displayed (i.e. only the most recent) possibly cut down on the amount of duplicate content?

 

I pull my blog titles, via php, and put them on my homepage and Google reads them and displays them in results. So it's a success for me!

 

I also havent had any duplicate issues using a PHP RSS feed. Just be sure you have plenty of navigation and you will be fine. If you had 500 pages with nothing but the same feed on them...of course you will have problems.

The same issues around static html pages apply to php produced RSS feeds