4 replies to this topic

[CADSHOPGUY]

My new SEO forum home is here .. i hope, if my posts get answered.

RSS and shopping sites:

I created an XML file that looks like below:

<item>
<title>Product Name</title>
<description>Product Description</description>
<link>url to product page</link>
</item>

Is this a complete waste of time sumbitting my RSS feed to aggregators ? Clearly people want to use RSS for news content primarily or 99% of the time. I'm always trying to discover new ways to optimize my site.

On a side note, would it make sense to create profiles on sites that accept rss feeds like twitter and create a page where I can run my rss along with another rss feed about "shopping" from yahoo rss ?

Hope that all made sense.

Any suggestions or comments ?

[chovy]

It wouldn't hurt if you have customers interested in following new products. However, most shopping aggregate sites require a specific format of their own -- while still XML it isn't RSS format.

[CADSHOPGUY]

I submitted my site to googlebase (using their XML format) which seems to be the one that most people know. It has made a slight difference in traffic.

Yahoo shopping no longer is free or has gone in a new direction, msn's version of googlebase has been down for a while.

I'm wondering when you submit the feeds to the aggregators do your feeds get added to the site as a new page ? At least if that is true, then it would serve a purpose of backlinks.

Trying to optimize my site on a zero dollar budget is a real challenge.

[Randy]

I wouldn't consider rss feeds of shopping sites a Must Do thing by any stretch of the imagination. For the reasons already noted.

However having a feed of some sort that you can get into Googlebase and possible some of the comparison shopping sites can be useful. Not so much for SEO purposes or link building purposes. Though the Base feed may get you showing up in the SERPs for specific product searches and comparison sites may rank well enough to get your link in front of potential buyers.

[CADSHOPGUY]

I wouldn't consider rss feeds of shopping sites a Must Do thing by any stretch of the imagination. For the reasons already noted.

However having a feed of some sort that you can get into Googlebase and possible some of the comparison shopping sites can be useful. Not so much for SEO purposes or link building purposes. Though the Base feed may get you showing up in the SERPs for specific product searches and comparison sites may rank well enough to get your link in front of potential buyers.

I think my main goal at this point is more promoting than SEO. I have found some smaller sites which offer free feed submission like biddhopper dot com.

I've also promoted my sites on classified sites such as kijiji.

I'm trying to figure out a way to raise my traffic by another thousand visits per day but that seems to be a difficult feat. I'm at the point where i'm experimenting.

Yesterday I created a page on tumblr dot com and added two feeds:

1. Yahoo Shopping RSS feed for interest
2. My own shopping items feed

This way if my feeds are grouped into a page with relevant content it won't seem to spammy. Not really sure if that was useful or a waste of time.

[snip]


I'm hoping msn live shopping will work similar to google base or at least have an impact. My site barelyl gets any traffic from yahoo and msn to begin with.