Google Really Does Pay Attention To Feeds
By: Sally Falkow
2009-11-02
There has been speculation about the efficacy of putting news content into RSS feeds for some time. As early as 2005 Charlene Li, then at Forrester Research, said if you do nothing else, put your press releases in RSS feeds. The TEKgroup/Bulldog Reporter survey shows increasing use of RSS feeds by journalists every year. Other research shows that 98% of journalists start a story by doing a Google search.
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It has been suggested that content in a feed gets more attention from Google and now theyve confirmed it.
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. Google Webmaster Blog.
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 your news content into a social media newsroom with feeds on all content categories. Make it easier for Google to find your content and index it faster. Get an edge in search so journalists find your content when they search your topics.
The Google blog post also has advice on how the feeds and the website should be programmed " bear with me here, this gets a little technical: In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, its 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.
The point of this is that weve seen many a feed incorrectly programmed. Google has to see it right away andthey have to be able to crawl the feed. So make sure your webmaster or IT department is up to speed on the latest RSS technology. If they dont see the feed on your site it cant be used to get you faster indexing and better ranking.
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 says they find your feeds.)
If you have audio and video content, the feeds have to have specific tags added so that your multimedia content gets indexed not only by search engines, but also by sites like iTunes.
If all this is Greek to you, pass it along to your webmaster or your IT department. If you have questions about how to leverage your news content with feeds, email me at sally@press-feed.com
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About
the Author:
Sally is the author of Website Content Strategy blog: Information about the shifts in media consumption and the use of
technology in marketing and PR so business can stay in touch with their rapidly moving audiences.
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