RSS Feed Website Intergration

Does it bring any meaningful traffic - spiders or real visitors?

[3Mice]

Hi everyone,

I've come across different sales pages on the net trying to sell you rss feed software.

They claim that if used wisely ie having real content on your site supplimented by rss feeds then you stand a better chance of regular visits from spiders epecially googlebot since you are getting fresh content and ultimately increasing visitor traffic to your site.

Have you had any positive results from intergrating RSS feeds to your site by getting additional traffic?

[werty]

There are numerous free solutions available - look at CARP and MAGPIE, they both allow you to include other sites feeds on your site, with a zero $$$ risk to you.

As far as having other peoples feeds on your site to boost rankings/freshness, I would say your best bet is to write your own new unique content on a regular basis.

[Stefan]

I don't know about using feeds from other sites, but it helps if you start your own feed. Original content is the ultimate source of traffic.

[teaperson]

It also matters what your content is about. If there's a community of people online who will feel tied to the subject of your content, and want to see the latest, you might hook them in with an RSS feed (for example, if you're a skiing site with articles about ski racing or new products). If people don't feel a need to keep up with your content, the RSS feed will do nothing for you.

[Stefan]

True, Teaperson, but I have Googlebot checking that .xml several times a day, and I've found it's a good way to have new pages that are relatively buried in the site picked up quickly (my navigation is a horror-story). If you post "items" about your new pages, with a link to them, G knows about them right away. For me, at least, G hasn't crawled as deeply, as often, over the last month or two, so the technique helps. Plus, your users know immediately about new additions to the site.

Anyway, I didn't mean to dump on the person who started the thread, but I do believe that when it comes to RSS, webmasters should also think about creating their own feeds, rather than just using other's feeds for kw benefits.