Table of Contents
- What is an RSS feed?
- Setting up your RSS Reader
- Are RSS feed SEO Benefits Real?
- Does Adding RSS to My Site Improve Search Ranking?
- What Does Google Say About it?
- Does Google index RSS feeds?
- Are There Any Downsides to RSS Feeds?
- Conclusion
What is an RSS feed?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed notifies the users about the latest updates on their favorite websites. Just like Google search features, RSS feed offers a convenient way to consume content.
An RSS feed is an excellent way for website owners to engage with their readers. If your website has a substantial readership, creating an RSS web feed can help you build engagement and ensure your fresh and relevant content reaches your target audience.
Most people think RSS feed is dead, but it’s pretty much alive and kickin’ in the world of search engine marketing. Readers who consume online content of an ever-evolving nature, such as actionable SEO copywriting tips,style=”font-often use an RSS feed to get all their good reads in one place.
As part of the technical SEO, setting up an RSS link on your website allows visitors to subscribe to your blog posts. Suppose you publish a new SEO blog on SEO tips or social media writing advice. In that case, your subscribers will be notified through their RSS feeds. At the users’ end, the SEO blog feeds will display the title and description of the blogs. Some RSS feeds even feature stripped-down images and videos. By clicking on the feed, they will be redirected to your website, where they can read the full story.
Setting up your RSS Reader
Setting up an RSS feed on your website ensures you never lose your ideal readers. It helps you stay on top of the mind of your target audience and attract quality website traffic every time you publish a new blog.
Setting up an RSS reader is a pretty straightforward process. With a free-to-use RSS Builder and a little bit of HTML coding maneuver, you can set up an RSS feed on your website in minutes.
You can add the title, published date, and description of your new post, which will appear in the RSS Reader of your subscribers. Here’s a step-by-step video tutorial to help you set up an RSS builder on your website:
WordPress users can use a plugin to set up an RSS feed on their website. Some common plugins are WP RSS Aggregator, Feedzy RSS Feeds, WPeMatico RSS Feed Fetcher, RSS with Images, and WordPress RSS Feed Retriever, to name a few.
If all of this is too technical for you, consider hiring a website developer or a digital marketing specialist for the job.
Are RSS feed SEO Benefits Real?
Having an RSS feed has no direct search marketing benefits, but it’s one of those nice-to-haves that elevate the user experience. An RSS feed is a two-way street that helps publishers and readers alike.
While readers use an RSS feed to stay updated on the latest news and blog posts, publishers, on the other hand, use an RSS feed to build a loyal, long-term readership. Moreover, readers can have their own news feed reader personalized to their preferences.
RSS feed may not give you an instant search engine ranking boost, but it does help Google and other search engines to crawl and index your new pages. Let’s say your website publishes blogs regularly. Setting up an RSS feed allows the search engines to quickly crawl and index your new pages and show them to your audience.
Another RSS SEO benefit in terms of content marketing is that it drives repeat visitors to your website, which will reflect positively in your Google Analytics. As a result, your website may get a slight ranking boost.
SEO RSS feeds can be highly beneficial for news sites, blogs, forums, and websites like Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land that update their content frequently. Although their primary focus is building engagement, the efforts often translate into better search engine optimization performance in the long run.
Does Adding RSS to My Site Improve Search Ranking?
Ask any Internet marketing company and they will tell you that there’s no direct correlation between RSS and search rankings. However, the RSS feed helps search engines with content discovery. Whenever a website publishes a new page, the RSS feed works as a Sitemap, allowing Google to crawl quickly and index new pages.
RSS is preferred over Sitemap by most bloggers and news websites because Sitemap can handle only 1000 URLs per website, whereas there are no URL caps in RSS.
As far as the search ranking goes, there’s no straight answer.
Since RSS helps build engagement and drive repeat visitors to the website, Google may take notice and reward the website with search visibility. If the visitor pattern continues for a long time, the website may also get a ranking boost.
What Does Google Say About It?
Like it or not, almost all of your search engine optimization activities are influenced by Google guidelines. If Google says it’s the right thing to do, you do it – no questions about it. Regarding using RSS, Google has clarified that it doesn’t improve search rankings. However, Google also specified that RSS helps Googlebot to crawl and index new pages quickly. As a result, Google can show your new pages to visitors based on their interests and browsing behaviors.
According to Google, using RSS feeds can enhance user experience. Websites that are working hard to create content for their target audience can leverage RSS feeds to retain, grow and engage with their ideal visitors.
Does Google index RSS feeds?
Yes, it does. Google indexes RSS feeds as long as the publisher sets them up properly through RSS feed submission. Google will crawl the RSS feed regularly and index new pages as and when they are published. As a matter of fact, RSS feeds get your web pages crawled and indexed faster than otherwise.
Moreover, RSS feed submission benefits publishers in many ways. Submitting RSS feeds to directory sites helps them tap into an audience base that relies on a feed reader to get the latest updates instead of social media browsing. Here are some of the popular RSS submission directory sites:
www.feedage.com
www.rapidfeeds.com
www.feedspot.com
www.plazoo.com
www.feedlisting.com
www.rss6.com
www.blogflux.com
www.blogrollcenter.com
Are There Any Downsides to RSS Feeds?
Like most things in life, RSS is not perfect. It has its fair share of disadvantages for both users and website owners. Let’s look at some of the common drawbacks of RSS feeds.
Lack of photos and graphics
RSS feed reader offers a no-frill view of articles which generally lack vivid visuals. While it’s necessary to strip down the article to shave off the extra weight, the text-only feed may appear bland and unappealing.
Exposure to content theft
When you put in a lot of effort to create original, valuable content for your readers, you don’t want someone else to take the credit for it. However, RSS feeds open the backdoor for third-party websites to republish your content without giving the credit where it’s due. So, when you use an RSS feed to syndicate your content, chances are someone might try to mooch off your hard work.
Tracking may not be an option
When you work hard to create content for your readers, you will want to have some sort of SEO insights to find out if your readership is growing. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to track RSS subscribers accurately. There are certain tools that can estimate the number of subscribers, but you can’t rely on those numbers as they fluctuate like crazy every day.
Conclusion
Most online marketing professionals and local SEO experts think that RSS feed is going obsolete, and it is something that you’ll tell your grandchildren about. But even in 2023, an RSS feed is a must-have for a blog, news website, forum, or any SEO strategy that involves frequent publishing.
RSS feeds help Google crawl and index new pages so that the word gets out faster and reaches the intended audience. You can either code it into your website or get a done-for-you plugin.
If you are still on the fence about getting an RSS feed on your website, here are a few things to consider.
First, you don’t need a comprehensive site audit to make out that the RSS feed has no impact on your ranking whatsoever. However, if a handful of internet marketers are to be believed, RSS web feed might improve certain metrics, eventually giving you a slight ranking boost.
Also, an RSS feed will benefit a content-intensive website more than a static website that barely receives an update.
