I have two questions. 1. If I have Rss feeds from other sites (i.e.) news rss feeds on my site or forum, does this affect my server space and/or bandwidth? 2. If I have rss feeds, which are clearly external links (news rss feeds), does this affect my ranking? Thanks.....
Can someone please help me with this; I really need to know. Especially the first question because I want to know if I should include RSS feeds in my site or not, because i am afraid it might take a lot of my server space and band width. Thanx....
feeds are from other sites, it should not put any load time on your own server. it may take *longer* for pages to load while they load the info from feeds off your site. But no, it will not take up your server "space". The bandwidth is used for page loads off YOUR pages, not other people's pages. That said, if your site is taking a long time to load because of all the external content loading from elsewhere, site visitors may get annoyed or bored waiting, and simply leave never having seen your site at all. Another bad side to too many feeds is that your site may become penalized by the search engines because you have no content of your own. Original content that physically lives ON your site, not being fed from elsewhere. Hope that helps to explain some.
My Dear Brothers and Sisters RSS from other sites are useful incase you want to show your visitors some latest news from various sites but the syndication should be limited to few sites otherwise it will definitely use your bandwith and disappoint visitors. ack Whereas if your feeds are add in external websites then it is definitely a good thing to get but you will not get direct backlinks though you will not get direct backlinks as this feeds are not crawled by google.
Isn't this how google get their news though? All from other sites right? Oh thanks for the explanation about the bandwidth and by pointing out that this might slow down my site, because i have noticed in the past my site being slow even though i hardly had any content on it (running on a dedicated server).
I think its good for content but its not yours, try to have 100% Original content plus your linking to thier site, so you could loss pagerank so I don't use them
If you are using an RSS tool such as SimplePie (or most others) they have a 'cache' feature to store the feed results. The cache refresh time can be set for any duration (10 minutes, 1 hour, daily). You should actually have this enabled as a courtesy to the websites that are giving you the feed, nothing like hammering them every time your page gets hit. If the cache is not enabled, the delay you experience is from requesting the feed (times how many feeds you are calling) and waiting for a response from the external server. Any request to external servers puts you at the mercy of that server. If it is slow, yours sits in a holding pattern until you get the data from it. Reminds me of an old computer saying, "Your computer is only as fast as it's slowest piece of equipment". This translates well to syndication of feeds too.
hmmm....very interesting. I think the best thing to do is to store it in a db every say 1 hour or so, that way each feeds that's showing on the site is pre-captured. this is a good idea. i am still wondering though if this will have a big effect on my server (like the space and bandwidth) since these feeds will be stored into a database on my server.