Forum Moderators: open
<source> is an optional sub-element of <item>.Its value is the name of the RSS channel that the item came from, derived from its <title>. It has one required attribute, url, which links to the XMLization of the source.
<source url="http://www.tomalak.org/links2.xml">Tomalak's Realm</source>
The purpose of this element is to propagate credit for links, to publicize the sources of news items. It can be used in the Post command of an aggregator. It should be generated automatically when forwarding an item from an aggregator to a weblog authoring tool.
But i am not certain if i should use,
<source url="http://www.widgets.com/links2.xml">Widgets LTD</source>
or
<source url="http://www.widgets.com/links2.html">Widgets LTD</source>
Anyone know what effect this might have on feeders or SEO factors?
Also i am unclear on what the <title> has to do with this.
If my title is the following,
<title>Widgets.com: Cheap Widgets</title>
Does that mean my source url should look like this,
<source url="http://www.widgets.com/links2.xml">Widgets.com: Cheap Widgets</source>
?
Any help appreciated, as i am a RSS , XML newbee.
Since most RSS readers don't do anything special with this element, it really doesn't matter how you use it and it shouldn't really affect SEO.
The title in the source element should be the title of the blog or name of the author you are sourcing.
Here's an example...
On the Besting Adwords blog, I recently wrote up my thoughts on Chitika.
<snip>
I got the idea for the entry from JenSense at the following URL
<snip>
For that blog entry, I set the source as follows.
<source url="http://www.example.com/archives/2006/01/chitika_release.html">JenSense</source>
I could also have set the url to her RSS feed, but that's not very useful.
[edited by: werty at 9:16 am (utc) on Jan. 15, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed URLs - Please see TOS #13 [/edit]
