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
-
Should you delete old blog posts for SEO purposes?
Hey all, When I run crawl diagnostics I get around 500 medium-priority issues. The majority of these (95%) come from issues with blog pages (duplicate titles, missing meta desc, etc.). Many of these pages are posts listing contest winners and/or generic announcements (like, "we'll be out of the office tomorrow"). I have gone through and started to fix these, but as I was doing so I had the thought: what is the point of updating pages that are completely worthless to new members (like a page listing winners in 2011, in which case I just slap a date into the title)? My question is: Should I just bite the bullet and fix all of these or should delete the ones that are no longer relevant? Thanks in advance, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing1 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
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 -
Buying Expired Domains with Decent DA/PA for SEO Purposes
Hey guys, i've seen some stuff about this before but I recently found an opportunity to put it into action and wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into! I am looking at buying a domain (expired and now only 10 dollars) that has a decent domain authority and has some keywords in it related to my clients practice. I plan on using a 301 redirect to pass "link juice" because this client is looking for a quick bump in rankings. Thoughts? Benefits? Problems with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley1 -
Link Research Tools - Detox Links
Hi, I was doing a little research on my link profile and came across a tool called "LinkRessearchTools.com". I bought a subscription and tried them out. Doing the report they advised a low risk but identified 78 Very High Risk to Deadly (are they venomous?) links, around 5% of total and advised removing them. They also advised of many suspicious and low risk links but these seem to be because they have no knowledge of them so default to a negative it seems. So before I do anything rash and start removing my Deadly links, I was wondering if anyone had a). used them and recommend them b). recommend detoxing removing the deadly links c). would there be any cases in which so called Deadly links being removed cause more problems than solve. Such as maintaining a normal looking profile as everyone would be likely to have bad links etc... (although my thinking may be out on that one...). What do you think? Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index
We have a similar problem to http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-a-xml-sitemap-index-point-to-other-sitemaps-indexes Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes? According to the "Unique Doll Clothing" example on this link, it seems possible http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic Can someone share an XML Sitemap index within a XML sitemaps index example? We are looking for the format to implement the same on our website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lakshdeep0 -
Yoast SEO Plugin: To Index or Not to index Categories?
Taking a poll out there......In most cases would you want to index or NOT index your category pages using the Yoast SEO plugin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10