Has anyone got any experience of significant positive effects of syndicating their site content?

I'm building a new content management system, with a very strong SEO bias and decided to include automatic creation of the entire site content in RSS 2.0 format. While the format of the xml output is extremely simple, it's actually been quite tricky to get the dynamic creation of the output just right. I've almost cracked it though.

I've actually never bothered with RSS before, although I'm infinitely aware of what they say the benefits are - but I've not come across anyone who can actually verify the hype. So, has anyone here got information/experience they could share? Also - are there any top tips that I might find useful?

The new CMS system is quite basic by all accounts, but highly original too. It makes extensive use of AJAX to hugely speed up the interaction with the system and produce some rather clever and unique features.

I've still got a couple of weeks to go before it's ready for launch, but it's starting to get quite exciting. The clients I've shown the system to so far have been really blown away by what it can do. I can only assume they don't get out much? hehe

Sorry, back to the topic. I'm interested in RSS, and anyone's real experience of the effects of syndication - along with any hints/tips.

I would also be delighted to hear any comments / suggestions for features to include into this new CMS system. I'm intersted in SEO related comments only at this point though.

So, for example:

• RSS syndication
• RSS syndicated news & articles
• Ability to display RSS feeds on any topic, in any page.
• RSS Syndicated Blog capability
• Integrated keyword tool
• Integrated Ranking Checker
• etc...

All of the above have already been built in - I'm on the look out for new ideas though?

Please remember though, it's a CMS that could be used for any website. It's not industry or market specific.

Appreciate your help and input.

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www.bsolveit.com
Web Design & SEO for Business Growth

I am a strong propontent of RSS. We've used it on our company's and many clients sites with great results...but you are talking about syndicating the entirre site? That may not be good. Can you PM me a link to a live version of your CMS?

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Can I ask why it might not be a good idea?

Oh - when I say the "entire site" available is RSS, I didn't mean the entire content of every page. In each item, the RSS item just shows the first few hundred characters of any page by way of an intro, but you have to visit the real page to get the full content. Is that all you meant? Hope so. (fingers crossed! hehe)

The feed is created dynamically and therefore automatically updates the 'pubdate' if the page is edited. It seems to work well. It also automatically categorises everything depending on it's placement within the menu structure of the site.

The CMS is designed to cope with any number of menu levels and nested sub levels; although I've put in a default limit at 32. This can be lifted at any time though. I mention it because it allows for really easy management of site pages and data - which therefore, hopefully, will ensure a meangingful rss feed of categorised content.

__________________
www.bsolveit.com
Web Design & SEO for Business Growth

Bsolve:

Peoples say that RSS help in SERP and Popularity.But i am unable to find any RSS page in google SERP yet.Even in yahoo not a single RSS url is visible.However some one in a forum suggested that RSS is highly useful in yahoo.

Now YAHOO have problem in reading RSS.(Published webmasterworld.com few week ago)

Can any one tell me what are actual benefit of RSS??

Any one finding this technology helpful??

Kindly let me know.


Few

It's easy enough to find RSS items if you look in the right places.
For example, http://news.google.com - try a search for 'seo'

The power of RSS, is in the fact that so many web sites display RSS feeds. We do on every page of our site actually. It gives us continually updated relevant content. Plus, millions of people use newsreaders and follow subjects by watching the headlines that appear in their readers.

It's said that your site traffic can increase dramatically, overnight, if you syndicate your content - so long as it's orginal and relevant content.

I'm a complete newbie to rss in terms of syndicating content though. Until now all I've done is consume RSS feeds that others have published.

__________________
www.bsolveit.com
Web Design & SEO for Business Growth

BsolveIT:

Can you please tell me how many peoples types loans,finance,pharmacy like keywords in news.google.com.

And what is overall search percentage in google news section??

Eh? Are you serious? hehe

I think you would have to direct those questions to someone at Google.

I've no idea if, when, or how people use the service. Please remember my post in here is to establish how useful and successful syndicated content is because I have no experience of it.

All the hype I've read suggests it can make a dramatic difference to your site traffic, and that the search engines like RSS content because it's regularly updated fresh content. The key there being fresh content.

Thats not to say that all RSS content is fresh - but it usually includes a published date, so it's quick and easy to establish how fresh it is.

Why would you want those detailed statistics about news.google.com anyway? Have you used the Yahoo News service? Or MSN? There's lots of them.

A popular one for people wanting to publish news feeds on their site is moreover.com - we used to use that one.

__________________
www.bsolveit.com
Web Design & SEO for Business Growth

Bsolve:

Look!! ultimate goal for SEO is traffic.Whether it is seo,ppc or RSS feed.We all wanted to incerase our booking traffic. Offcource i am also looking for same.

Now if i dont know what is the marcket share of news section we cant predict whether RSS technique is useful or not.

I am also interested to work with RSS ,even tried to implement RSS feed in past but left the idea because of the news "Yahoo have problem in reading RSS feed" .

Now you are working on this technology so i thought you had been collected all these detail so asked to you!!

Hope this will clarify your all Q.

Look yourself!!! Sheesh! Have a chill pill and get over yourself.

Honestly, I don't think I would pay any attention to "someone" from webmaster world saying Yahoo can't read an RSS feed. hehehe - they may be having problems reading 'his' RSS feed - but it's a fairly sure bet that the problem lies with him, not with Yahoo. Also, there's a number of different RSS formats, some more complex than others.

I can tell you that the vast majority of people that consume RSS feeds do so on the RSS 1.0 standard. I'm afraid I can't remember where I got that info....um... I'm pretty sure it was a Yahoo press release relating to their RSS submissions.

Sorry though, I tell you what - you tell me how anyone could gather those stats about a Google service, and I'll go do it for you. Hows that?

__________________
www.bsolveit.com
Web Design & SEO for Business Growth

He's probably referring to a simple glitch...I've had it happen too. An RSS feed that was fine wouldn't load into Yahoo. A few hours later it would. No big deal, things happen.

Ok, my .02 as it relates to the RSS feeds:

1. The link that takes you to the RSS feed gives you the option to filter other categories on the left side of the screen in IE, however that option isn't available in FF.

2. I would suggest shortening the feed to 10 entries. I know Yahoo only displays 10, I would assume that feed reader would be the same. Plus, with a smaller number of entries, the % of changed content would be higher on each feed making it appear "fresher" to the SEs.

3. I would add links to each category's RSS feed available on the index, perhaps w/ a CSS drop down menu to save space.

4. I would add the option to add to MyYahoo & MyMSN for the RSS feeds (like we have on our blog).

General CMS issues:

1. Remove the following tags:

<meta name="author" content="Mark McNeece of BSolve IT Limited. http://www.bsolveit.com">
<meta name="robots" content="all">

2. Make the desc. & title tags dynamic so that each page is unique.

3. I would consider removing the images from the <h> tags. The current set up may (will probably) dillute the SEO effectiveness of the tags.

That's a pretty cool little java script on the images...I'm going to use that on our site. I look more into it when I have some more time over the weekend.

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