Ignoramus31199 wrote:
> I created four RSS news feeds for my site. They are there and they
> seem to work. No one can see them because I am not yet promoting them
> in any way. I know where they are, so I am subscribed to them to see if
> they work.
>
> These feeds are script driven and are fed from a special SQL
> table. The table is populated when certain content is added or
> deleted.
>
> The RSS feeds are only useful for users of my site. They are of no
> interest to people who do not intend to use my site (such as answering
> math questions from children).
>
> I heard that having RSS feed is viewed favorably by internet gods such
> as google. Is that true?
>
> Regardless, where should I place links to my feeds? Right now I
> created a special subdirectory with a single page listing my RSS feeds,
> with links to the feed XML files.
>
> Is that good enough? Should I bother with adding RSS tag to the
> headers of some of my pages? They do it at craigslist:
>
> http://chicago.craigslist.org/tls/
>
> if you look at headers, you will see an "alternate link" tag
> mentioning the rss feed. That could fit into some of the pages on my
> site (the pages that present updated information). Should I do it?
>
> any thoughts?
>
> I am an RSS rookie, I learned about RSS yesterday, more or less. I
> knew what it was for, before, but that was it.
>
> thanks
Hi again,
The first thing to check is whether broken links are contained in the feeds
and whether the feeds are flexible enough to index entire sections of the
site (e.g. by changing LIMIT in the SQL query).
RSS feeds on their own can imply that a site is technologically advanced and
hence worth admiring and sending visitors to. With blogging tools, however,
I am not sure how true this is anymore. Google site maps only bring up
skepticism among members of this group (alt.internet.search-engines) so I
suggest you look at posts from the past week.
Like you, I also created one page which lists all feeds so that a user can
choose the most suitable feed/s (press the orange XML in my front page to
see this page). Moreover, I added the most relevant feeds to the header of
all HTML files in order to benefit from Firefox Live Bookmark and its
subscribers (Internet Explorer 7 will soon catch up on that). If you are
interested, I can send you my Linux scripts which add the links recursively
in command-line mode.
RSS are the way to go as far as I can tell. I slowly accumulate subscribers
and I believe that you must go on the RSS 'wagon' as soon as possible. RSS
support is growing exponentially and once visitors get overloaded in terms
of number of subscriptions, they no longer have an appetite for them. You
must entice them as soon as they are introduced to RSS so hurry and
promote. Largely owing to RSS, John Bokma is able to attract ~3,000
visitors a day.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com
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