If i do not want to put orange xml button in the website as my content is not updated frequently and upload an rss.xml file in the root directory, will it benefit me in seo of the site as it will contain keywords in the feed , will it give better results in terms of search engines crawling all the pages of the site? Content is not updated frequently thats why i do not want users to see rss link on the site. Also in this way search engines will be able to see it. will it have benefits for me?
If you do not link to it "somehow", how could SEs know it exists? You should at least list it in the sitemap.xml and submit it. Otherwise, it won't be indexed.
Read my first post. What iam asking is if i don't show my rss.xml file to users and only to search engines like this : www.abc.com/rss.xml/ Is this legal in eyes of search engines as i do not want users to see the file as my content is not updated frequently.
I go out of my way to block search engines from RSS files, its duplicate content and scraper sites pick them up and auto generate a site from your content. Sorry but i think what your doing is less than ideal.
There could always be that risk. Even with no RSS somebody could just save your site and upload it for their own. There is no way to prevent that except going to legal path. RSS just make it easier for them to copy. There are always risk. Risk of duplicate content "punishment" from your site or from copies of your site by those criminals. However, the "return" of the risk of using RSS is higher than the risk itself. If not, how come those big names like CNN, Times, NY Times, etc use it.
Scrapers often run various inurl:.xml search queries, so having your feed URL's not indexed in Google by using robots.txt and nofollow means it can only be found by your few hundred visitors instead of a few hundred million people who query the web daily. Duplicate content isn't really a "punishment", but if Google finds 2 versions of your page (Web and RSS versions) they will choose which one to display in the SERP's. Often it can be the RSS version because it's linked directly from the home page, and it's low on junk meaning pure text which Google loves. Do you want people searching to find your RSS page in the SERP's instead of your Web version with full branding, design, logo, menu system etc? No of course not. Do you want your "link juice" passed to pages like the RSS page instead of consolidating it to only your Web pages you want to rank? No of course not. RSS is great for what it is, and that's allowing your users to Syndicate content to their feed reader. But trust me on this, block your feeds using Robots.txt and Nofollow all your site links pointing at your feed URL's.
I think the conclusion is not to use rss for search engines alone, show it to the visitors also through xml orange button.But if i do not have frequently updated content, its better not to use rss instead. Better?
You will notice that blogging engines and CMS such as WordPress might be configured to add a similar html tag in some or all of your pages: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.example.com/rss/" /> Google spider is smart enough to interpret it and use the information to index your site.