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Re: Fresh Content by Parsing RSS Feeds?

__/ [Dune] on Wednesday 02 November 2005 08:40 \__

> Keep it coming, it's all very good thinking, but I'd like to discuss
> for a moment:
> 
>>> Are you parsing some RSS feeds and diplaying their content in your front
>>> page?
> 
> Yes.
> 
>>> That is  not true. RSS is an object that happens to comply with XML (or
>>> SGML to be more precise) and the server delivers arbitrary objects, which
>>> are in turn interpreted by the browser.
> 
> I am referring not to the RSS feed offering at the top right of the
> page, but the RSS feeds printed out to the bottom of the home page. If
> you view the source, you can see that the .net on the backend is
> converting the XML to HTML < LI >'s. I am rotating a mix of 15
> different feeds, a random one gets displayed each time the page is
> loaded, which is what I meant when I said 'fresh content via RSS'
> because each time the bots come back they will see different content in
> that area of the page, either because a new feed was loaded or the same
> feed had since been supplied with new articles. I've long thought that
> fresh content updates to a site, preferably keyword-rich, would be
> smiled upon by the search algorithms. I'm thinking this should mean
> higher SERP placement, thus increased human traffic. Is my thinking
> flawed here? Really, I'm asking, not trying to tell you it's not ;)
> 
> Thanks for your thoughtful response, and any more insight is more than
> welcome.  -Greg

The change might/will motivate crawling that is more frequent. It will not
encourage  spiders to crawl your site /as a whole/ more often, but  rather
have  yet  another look at your front page, whose crawling cycle  will  be
shortened.

This has pros in the following scenarios:

-  Your  front page links to a collection of subpages that  need  indexing
ASAP, e.g. a site that delivers up-to-the-minute news.

-  Your front page needs to change its description or tergetted SERP  very
often,  e.g. one day you target the keywords "October sales" and the  fol-
lowing day you aim for "November sales".

Remember  that you cannot fool the crawlers into spidering much more  than
you deserve. You may end up expending a lot of time coding in vain only to
admire  your own work, but to no practical benefit. I happen to rotate the
graphics  in  my front page, but only for the sake of the visitors  (fresh
look), not to give an illusion of fresh content.

It is worth mentioning that several content management packages rotate ar-
ticles.  They do so in order to achieve an effect that is similar to  what
you  describe. This is usually content-driven though, e.g. display related
articles, customise to regions, time of the say etc. SEO out-of-the-box is
a  predominant selling point for CMS packages these days and with so  much
choice available, this can be crucial.

Roy

PS  - Please post in plain-text and trim lines at 60-78 chars. Also remem-
ber  to quote when replying or else the remainder of the reader would  get
lost.

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz      |    Useless fact: Falsity implies anything
http://Schestowitz.com  |    SuSE Linux     |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
  8:25am  up 68 days 14:14,  8 users,  load average: 0.28, 0.43, 0.45
      http://iuron.com - next generation of search paradigms

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