3 replies to this topic

[andrew gitt]

If I syndicate my RSS feed on other websites (ie, they agree to post my RSS feed of articles on their website) will those pages get indexed and count as backlinks? Can anyone show evidence.

I thought this was good idea to provide articles with links in article in anchor text but heard that google does not index rss feeds.

can we get a discussion going on this to shed light and learn something

Also is exchanging articles (with your links in article to your website) beneficial. Exchanging plain links is worthless, but what about articles? Is it worth extra effort to exchange articles on 3 way strategy

[Randy]

You don't see many RSS feeds showing up in the SERP pages do you? There's a reason for that. People who want to read RSS feeds use an RSS Reader and not a browser. Searcher use a browser, not an RSS Reader.

So no, your RSS feeds aren't going to show up in the SERPS like a normal web page will.

But now if someone were to take this RSS feed and convert it into plain old HTML and drop it into a page it will get spidered and indexed. And just like any other html page, will have a chance of showing up in the SERPs.

As far as links go, nobdy can say if links in RSS pass any link popularity or not. The search engines aren't talking on this subject. We can see however that they (especially Google) seem to be using RSS feeds to discover new pages. We see it here on these forums, on other high profile forums that provide RSS feeds, on News sites and even on Blogs. So they use RSS feeds, but whether those links pass any link popularity value or not.

As to your last question, how and why would you think plain link exchanges are worthless? If you think this is true you're obviously not exchanging links with the right kinds of sites, because link exchanges still have value. And I'm not sure how you would expect the search engines to differentiate between a normal web page and an article. They can't, unless the only place they see some content is on article sites.

[Jill]

You don't see many RSS feeds showing up in the SERP pages do you?

I actually do. But I don't think they really should be, however.

[Randy]

Yer just strange though. Or perhaps I should say you search for strange things, where RSS is a major content delivery method.

I practically never see RSS feeds in the SERPs. Only when I specifically search for 'em.