Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
RSS feeds- What are the secrets to getting them, and the links inside then, indexed and counted for SEO purposes?
-
RSS feeds, at least on paper, should be a great way to build backlinks and boost rankings. They are also very seductive from a link-builder's point of view- free, easy to create, allows you to specifiy anchor text, etc. There are even several SEO articles, anda few products, extolling the virtues of RSS for SEO puposes.
However, I hear anecdotedly that they are extremely ineffective in getting their internal links indexed. And my success rate has been abysmal- perhaps 15% have ever been indexed,and so far, I havenever seem Google show an RSS feed as a source for a backlink. I have even thrown some token backlinks against RSS feeds to see if that helped in getting them indexed, but even that has a very low success rate.
I recently read a blog post saying that Google "hates aRSS feeds" and "rarely spiders perhaps the first link or two." Yet there are many SEO advocates who claim that RSS feeds are a great untapped resource for SEO. I am rather befuddled.
Has anyone "crackedthe code" onhow to get them,and the links that they contain, indexed and helping rankings?
-
Actually, RSS feeds are also used as a defensive method of link building. YOAST makes a plugin for Wordpress that everyone should use (if they use wordpress), one of the features is inserting text and links into your RSS feed.
Obnoxious scraper sites use RSS feeds to populate their websites, they do not monitor the content, its all automated. By putting links and a citation in your RSS feeds, this lets you at least get a little benefit from their theft of your content.
Link Explorer shows feedburner and a couple other RSS agg sites as high value referring sites.
-
why would anyone need this service? I believe the original question was RSS feeds from the site owner being indexed? RSS feeds should be submitted too google webmaster tools to be index by google and Bing offers a similar service too webmasters, After initial submission the webmaster never has to submit again?
If I wanted to push my content using RSS feeds then I would use Ping.fm to push my content and links to third party sites and social media.......
I am at a loss why a webmaster would use the linkilecious site?
-
Really detailed overlook. Nice touching on everything.
-
If I understand the question correctly you would like your content to be spread to other sites through rss feeds and then be indexed there with a backlink to your site?
Number 1: there must be a reason for the other site to index and create a backlink to your site.
Number 2: these links are almost always "no follow" and therefore need to reach a very high amount of links to be of any real use for you if you want to affect the serp.
eg: You submit your site to several "ping" sites of your choosing that index certain content and then when you publish a new story these sites get pinged from your cms and a nofollow backlink is created for you on that site,
Just make certain that these sites that you ping actually has good content and have fills a puropose for the visitors.
A better way though to keep control over the material is to create an own site running wordpress where you write about your site as a blog. Just put a news section in a sidebar and put your RSS feed in there. wordpress sites are indexed extremly fast and when you own the site you can choose to use follow links in the section on the blog site.
This should lead to a faster indexing and you create backlinks that have a function and furthermore you own the site linking to you primary site.
A short summary:
RSS feeds are good to spread content and attract visitors. They're not a quick way to get backlinks.
-
We use an RSS feed for new product lists. We may have some lag time before a new product gets put in a category and able to be browsed to on our site. The RSS feed gives a few days head start getting these new products into the search engines. We redirect all RSS links back to the main site links that include canonical tags for the main product pages.
-
RSS should be designed primarily for your users and secondly to syndicate out using RSS Aggregators to distribute parts of your content (headlines and URLS)
Be careful about how much of the article content you include within the RSS Feed themselves. Whilst is it good for the user to include the full article within the feed by doing so you are also giving scrapers an an easy time to reproduce your content and thus might end up being penalising for duplicate content even though you are the original source (I've seen this happen).
I've used two techniques in the past the first was to publish a short additional body that contain a call to action to follow the link to the original article stub. I then switched to publishing the full content within the feed just for my users but I am thinking about going changing it again and publishing part of the content within the feed and then have a call to action for the reader to visit my site for the full article which will hopefully increase CTR on the feed whilst reducing the content duplication issue
-
The link building power of rss feeds is simply in getting other sites to feature and link to your content via rss. There would be no utility for a bot to crawl your feed stand alone, it would rather just look at the content itself. Try submitting your feed to rss directories or having other webmasters feature your feed on their site. I believe several web 2.0 sites like squid allow for feed publishing as well. Hope that helps.
-
Sorry, I'm a little confused as well. Why would you want people linking to your RSS feed instead of your original posts? Why would you even want the RSS feed to be indexed and returned in search results rather than the original posts? Wouldn't Google want to link people to the original post vs. the RSS feed? Aren't RSS feeds supposed to be a feed of content already on your site... so I don't see why Google would have much of an incentive to spider it or return it in search results?
-
You load links into it, it then creates an RSS feed on their end that gets pinged. You can load any kind of link into it and it'll ping them.
-
Thanks, but Linklicious turns links into RSS feeds- it doesn't help get the RSS feeds, or their internal links, to get indexed as far as I know. Am I not understanding the service correctly?
-
This service works well, I've personally tested it: http://linklicious.me/
Try that or another pinging service, there are a ton of them out there.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does Navigation Bar have an effect on the link juice and the number of internal links?
Hi Moz community, I am getting the "Avoid Too Many Internal Links" error from Moz for most of my pages and Google declared the max number as 100 internal links. However, most of my pages can't have internal links less than 100, since it is a commercial website and there are many categories that I have to show to my visitors by using the drop down navigation bar. Without counting the links in the navigation bar, the number of internal links is below 100. I am wondering if the navigation bar links affect the link juice and counted as internal links by Google. The Same question also applies to the links in the footer. Additionally, how about the products? I have hundreds of products in the category pages and even though I use pagination I still have many links in the category pages (probably more than 100 without even counting the navigation bar links). Does Google count the product links as internal links and how about the effect on the link juice? Here is the website if you want to take a look: http://www.goldstore.com.tr Thank you for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onurcan-ikiz0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Blog On Subdomain - Do backlinks to the blog posts on Subdomain count as links for main site?
I want to put blog on my site. The IT department is asking that I use a subdomain (myblog.mysite.com) instead of a subfolder (mysite.com/myblog). I am worried b/c it was my understanding that any links I get to my blog posts (if on subdomain) will not count toward the main site (search engines would view almost as other website). The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks. That is why I prefer the subfolder location for the Blog. Can anyone tell me if I am thinking about this right? Another solution I am being offered is to use a reverse proxy. Thoughts? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecerbone0 -
Any SEO Penalties from Removing RSS Feed?
Hi, I have a site that has a Feedburner feed that has been in place for 5+ years. I am considering getting rid of the feed or starting a new one to combat content scraping. Google continues to rank thieves' sites ahead of mine. Google and Bing have no issue and always get it right. I use Wordpress and have the plugin PubSubHubb, but that is no guarantee. Nonetheless, there is no monetary value of my subscribers whereas the content not being accredited to me takes money out of my pocket as my model is advertising. Is there any SEO issue if I do any of the following: Delete the feed and not have one? Change the feed address and drop all subscribers? Attachments: DMCA Dashboard; example of being outranked by scrapers. My site: www.furniturefashion.com Thanks for your time and hopefully I did not vent too much. OWmou6k f6W3xkq.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | will21121 -
Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page
Scenario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
We have 4 unique links.
In total we have 5 on page links. Question
How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
I'm looking for some clarity... Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop. The following are points to consider when responding The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on. There is roughly 2000 products Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself. Should we really be considering this path? The domain is diveidc.com One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner. We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0