3 replies to this topic

[DJKay]

Hi Gang,

A client came in and asked about RSS feeds. I was not in the meeting, so I was not able to speak about it at the time. I have been told that the client wants to run their proprietary content out to their sales staff/engineers through their blackberries.

When my boss spoke with me about it [asked me what rss feeds are], I told him it seemed a counter intuitive from what I understood RSS to be and how to use it. As I understand it, Realy Simple Syndication is or are XML feeds that are picked up by news aggregators. Obstensively, one would do this because you want to either (1) send out content you create as a feed to drive up rankings, & traffic through links pointing back to your site, etc. (2) you pick up feeds that are related to your site's content and have them on your site ultimately with the same end.

So, if you have proprietary content, that you do not want indexed in the engines so anyone could find it, you would NOT put it out in an RSS feed as I am understanding them to be.

Is their a secure RSS feed? Where you could just have the content go out to the blackberries and not have it spidered? Is there another way to do this or think about this?

I don't know if its just a marketing person that has heard about RSS feeds and just bringing up the idea [no inferences here, I am no where close to being an expert on this stuff--that is why I use this forum

Thanks in advance.

[Yipper]

Put the news feed in /rss/ folder and disallow search engines using robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /rss/

or

User-agent: *
Disallow: /rss.xml

if you don't do the folder thing.

[Tom Philo]

But the robots.txt block will only work for bots that honor the robot protocol - and many do not.

Secure using HTTPS and lock it down that way which means requiring a logon; or also secure the directory to require local domain logon accounts and skip the HTTPS portion.

Either way it means extra admin work on the back end. If you want it seamless so the users do not have to log in then if NT allow only authenticated users. Not sure what the same thing would be when using UNIX systems and active directory.

[Googlewhacked]

taphilo,

I'm a n00b when it comes to HTTPS, though I have a general understanding of the concept. Having said that, do you feel there is any risk to rankings when using it? A friend is working on a site that uses HTTPS & he has recently fallen out of the rankings for keywords that used to have a top 10 position for.

Is this just an unfortunate coincidence or could there be a connection?

Thx!