Rss

Does RSS help link popularity?

[panic]

Out of curiousity, does RSS help link popularity, or does it completely kill your link pop when Angelfire & Geocities sites start including your RSS?

-panic

[topr8]

i'm not sure of the answer to this... but

if the feed is being shown in an iframe i don't thing if it will make any difference either way.

[rogerd]

RSS displays that require a browser to run a script won't help, as the bots won't see the links. I'm not really familiar with the tools available for sites to display RSS, but I suppose you could also use server-side scripting to get the info and display it; in that case, the links would appear in the page HTML and could then be spidered.

[chiyo]

yes it all depends on how the receiving site parses and codes the RSS

Most RSS feeds are also offered in js format for ease; i used to assume these are not spiderable but now im not too sure.

If its a plain XML RSS feed however, the recieving site can use a whole set of commercial, open-source and custom developed RSS parsing scripts to display it, many of which are server side and will be easily spiderable by SE robots.

We have several feeds, but offer them in js as well as we have noticed many people dont have the capability to parse and display raw rss files. So most of our feeds displayed on sites out there are js versions.

However if you submit to some of the main RSS feed directories and services like syndic8 and newsisfree as well as the blogger type ones if you have a blog type RSS rather than a "news" one you may gain from those listings.

[panic]

Assuming they use something other than JS to parse the RSS (such as PHP, ASP, Perl, etc) that has spider friendly output, would it help my link popularity?

-panic

[rogerd]

If the links point to pages on your site, panic, then yes, they would. Typically, your feed would have a site link or news page link in it that would stay constant. Even if the article links change frequently (and hence wouldn't develop a PR boost) your constant page(s) would benefit.

[panic]

Would keeping a link to the homepage constant with about 3-5 changing articles be effective?

-panic

[rogerd]

I would expect that to work fine... Remember, of course, that the way the remote site displays your news will make a difference in its spiderability.

[panic]

Thanks! =)

-panic

[rise2it]

uh...what's rss?

[MonkeeSage]

RDF Site Summary, here [xml.com] is a comprehensive article on the different versions of RSS and their variations.

Jordan