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July 14, 2005
Adding RSS Content
I was viewing a discussion thread that mentions a program called RSS Indexed that sells for $199.00. They claim it works like:
RSS Indexer takes all of the hassle out of creating pages and submitting feeds for you. You simply point RSS Indexer towards a URL and it will spider EVERY PAGE on the site and gather content for the RSS Feed.Tell RSS Indexer how often you want it to submit and YOU ARE DONE!!! Your once Static website is now considered to have CONSTANTLY UPDATED CONTENT.
I guess there is something I don't quite understand here...
If you have a 100 page website full of static content, what is the purpose of turning static content into RSS feeds and having the same static content submitted every 18 days to the search engines. Is this suppose to make the site appear fresh?
If the search engines want FRESH content, wouldn't it make more sense to give them fresh content?
Sure, I understand 100 pages of fresh content might be a little much, but I will tell you what I found.
I was browsing through hotscripts.com and found a program called RSStatic.
Here is how this program works:
Typical web based RSS aggregators simply allow you to publish a headline and link from your chosen feed. This provides you with fresh content on your site and gives visitors a potential reason to return. This offers very little value to search engine optimization efforts. RSStatic goes one step beyond that.RSStatic takes information from the feeds you choose and generates static html pages for each item in the feed. This quickly turns a 10 page website into a much larger, more robust site complete with relevant content that continually grows.
I installed this as a way to share some of my favorite feeds with my site visitors. I did not submit this page to the search engines. A few days later I noticed the increase in traffic while viewing my stats and referring URLs. If you have a look at this URL from Google you can see it found about 300 new pages from the installation of this script.
Well... I guess I get to share my favorite feeds with more people then just my site visitors.
I guess if someone wanted to use this for a good tool to bring in targeted hits, they could make sure that the feeds they included were site and keyword related. At least it doesn't cost a lot, and the content is fresher. So comparatively speaking, I don't see the advantage of using "RSS Indexed" over the free RSStatic.
Posted by Steve MacLellan at July 14, 2005 06:37 AM
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Comments
I see it's been quite awhile since you created that demo site referenced above. Google gives it no page rank so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on RSStatic now. Is it worthwhile or pretty much non-relevant to the search engines?
Posted by: btvbill
at September 5, 2007 02:11 PM
I guess it is hard to say, Bill. It certainly still creates a number of links in Google for me as you can see here:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=+site:homebusiness-websites.com+homebusiness-websites.com+rss&hl=en&start=90&sa=N
I enetered the URL at this site http://www.selfseo.com/check_google_pagerank.php which is supposed to give you your Google PR of any link and my RSStatic index page returned a page rank of 5. You can check it yourself if you want — the URL that I checked was this one: http://www.homebusiness-websites.com/rss/index.php.
On another Google search I found links to the index from other people's sites, so I suppose one way links in, would be of some PR value.
Mind you, I don't pretend to be any type of SEO expert, but I would have to think I'm still getting some benefit from using the program, even if it isn't as much as I used to.
Best Regards,
Steve MacLellan
Posted by: Steve MacLellan
at September 6, 2007 09:38 AM
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