RSS Feeds Get Google’s Attention
posted in RSS Search Visibility, RSS Submission |
If you’re interested in better Google ranking put your content into RSS feeds.We’ve long suspected that Google pays attention to RSS Feeds and a recent post on their Webmaster Central blog confirms they have a feature that uses feeds for the discovery of new webpages.
“Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds.”
If you do not yet have your news content in RSS Feeds it should be top of your list of action items for 2010. In fact, get them set up now and be ready for the new year.
The blog post also has advice on how the feeds and the site are programmed: In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it’s important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools.
We’ve seen many a feed incorrectly programmed, so make sure your webmaster or IT department is up to speed on the latest RSS technology. Not only should the feed be crawlable it should also be immediately visible to search engines and your site visitors. If they don’t see the feed on your site it can’t be used to get you faster indexing.
All feed content should be optimized for search and the feed should automatically notify the major feed aggregators when new content is entered. (Notification services is one way Google finds your feeds.)
If you have audio and video content, the feed has to have specific tags added so that your multimedia content gets indexed not only by search engines, but also by sites like iTunes.
Need help with your feeds? Give Ryan a call on 626 793 4911.
Image Credit: Derek Kwa/Flickr