More Reasons To Maximize Your RSS Feeds
Google Webmaster Central recently announced that RSS and Atom feeds were now being used to discover new content on the web. It begs the question – are you including RSS or Atom feeds on your web site? If you are not including them, now is the time to. While you are at it, get Google reader and subscribe to your own feed.
Why subscribe to your own feed? There are two reasons now. I recommend subscribing as a quality control check – you see how your content is being reproduced in a feed. If there is a problem you can deal with it – if you don’t subscribe, you may never know the problem exists unless someone tells you.
The second reason is just as important. Google is using Reader as one of the methods of ‘discovering’ new content. The moment you read your content through your reader, Google is as well. If you have no subscribers, no one is reading that content. By subscribing, at least you are triggering that read.
Of course, pinging your feed will also help. Blogs get it easy in that department, particularly WordPress since it will ping new content to a list of sites you can define.
For web sites, you may have to ping manually using one of the third party ping sites. Either way, by pinging your content out you are spreading the number of opportunities to have others see your content and visit your site.
Once you have your RSS or Atom feed setup, make sure your robots.txt file allows the search engines to spider these feeds. Blocking access will mean that Google cannot index your content through your feed, it will have to do so by following a link – that takes a lot longer.
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