MSN RSS Feature - Effortless relevant content

Just thought I'd share this with you all. We've found a new feature of MSN search, which might provide useful content for your site.

The search engine allows you to return it's results in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format, using a simple technique.

This allows you to choose relevant content of your choice (by suitable selection of search parameters), then feed the results out via your website. Result - instant relevant content for everyone's website!

We are going to kick off an MSN optimisation campaign, then incorporate these results into our site. You may have already got the results you are looking for, if so then why not shout about it on your site.

Here's an example

http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?FORM=MSNH&CP=1252&q=ebusiness+cumbria&format=rss

Simply replace the search terms in this example (ebusiness and cumbria) with those that are relevant to your own site.

 

Thank you...

This seems to be a nice way to put up content on your sites... but I do feel that it may eventually work against you by driving people away rom your site, if yours is not already a very well established site.

My 2 cents...

 

1. Like said in the previous post. You would be driving people away from your website.
2. The content isn't updated that often, and it looks very spammy. Many auto generated websites have been doing this since MSN released RSS, it looks plain dirty.

I would really suggest taking a look at RSS however not with MSN or search engines in general. There is plenty of sources to RSS news from. Blogs, news sites, and plenty other sites are great for this.

 

As another suggestion, if you are worried that the content isn't changing enough - try changing the search terms randomly. Perhaps have a pool of 10 different search terms in which you rank well. Display one of such terms randomly each time the page is rendered.

 

I wouldn't personally recommend that because in the new google patent I recall reading around here it says when a website has links switching a lot, it would look frowned upon. I dont think this is however applied yet stricly enough to notice. I have to stick by regular RSS on this one

 

For a newly launched site, it might be devastating... Users will go away and you will not even get the cents that you get with AdSense...

 

We can only really speculate on the inner workings of the Googlebot. Now or in the future.

Search results don't change that frequently (normally every few days / weeks), but if it's causing concern don't use it. It's really just a suggestion for people who are struggling to find relevant content to put on the site.

It's also a good way to demonstrate to customers how you are doing as an SEO.

We use RSS in it's traditional form on our ebusiness news section of our site. We were simply pointed out that it has a number of different applications, beyond simple news feeds.

Out of interest it would appear that this thread now appears as #1 for ebusiness cumbria! So it wasn't a total waste of time (certainly not from our point of view).

 

There is a program called power rss that does this now. It's not too expensive.

B

 

isnt msn worried about hammering with this?
if many high traffic sites start using this, it will slow down their engine

 

Where did you read that? I am thinking thanks to a post by oldwelshguy that this may be my problem.

 

This was almost a year ago. I dont recall the exact location but looks for google patent infomation around. Thats as much as I can help at this point.