Editorial Staff
As an internet user, you’ve might probably seen the orange icon labeled as RSS feed.
It is normally shown like below:
It might appear like this in a website:
Not all the websites in the internet have RSS feed, but most of them do.
In this module, we’re going to explain about what is RSS feed, what are the benefits of using it, and how does it help to grow your SEO.
What is RSS Feed?
RSS feed stands for Really Simple Syndication or also known as Rich Site Summary.
However, most of the people called it as RSS feed or just “feed”.
RSS feed is basically a type of web feed that allows user to subscribe and receive regular updates from a website that they choose.
How Does RSS Feed Work?
RSS feed work by adding and publishing your latest content to the structured XML document.
This document then contains all the meta data such as date, author, category, full article, or just the summary.
By using this structured XML document, the RSS feed reader will then read the data, created a copy, and add to the database.
Then, the copied content is ready to be shown to anyone who subscribe to the RSS feed.
Some of the writing platform such as WordPress come with the build in support RSS feed. Meaning to say, if you’re using WordPress, you don’t need to bother setting up the RSS feed manually in the XML document.
So, Will It be Treated as Duplicate Content With The Original Content?
No, they aren’t.
The content from RSS feed are not accessible by the search engine bot or crawlers.
In the search engine point of view, they see it as the XML and HTML code snippets that created RSS feed.
In conclusion, the copied content in RSS feed will not be treated as duplicate with your original content that you have published in the website.
How The Audience Subscribe to RSS Feed?
In the audience or reader perspective, they can subscribe to a website’s RSS feed by using apps such as Feed Readers and Feedly.
Just by placing the URL and press the follow button to subscribe to the RSS feed.
In most of the feed readers, you are able to group your favorite sites into different categories or topics for neater management.
Benefits of RSS Feed
In a simple way to say, RSS actually make it easier for the audience to subscribe to a website content.
By using the RSS feed, they can receive the update from a website directly from their feed readers, email, and etc.
Instead of bookmarking a website one by one in the browser, RSS feed bring the content to a central location where the audience will read all their favorite content from different websites at once.
From a webmaster and publisher perspective, it help the website to build a loyal audience around their website.
RSS Feed in SEO
If you think that by setting up a RSS feed will directly boost your ranking, that is not going to happen.
However, RSS feed gave another impact to the SEO:
1. It Help Search Engine’s Bot to Crawl Faster
In 2015, John Mueller (Webmaster Trend Analyst) gave a lengthy explanation about RSS feed, and here are the conclusions:
- RSS feed does not have direct benefit to the SEO
- However, RSS feed help to crawl and index a webpage faster
In the chapter 3, you have learnt that popularity does attract Google’s bot to crawl your page faster.
And RSS feed does that popularity job since it is now your page will receive more traffic.
2. Indirect Impact
Although RSS feed does not have direct impact to SEO, it still has the indirect impact.
What is that?
By using RSS feed, you’re sharing your content to reach more audience than without.
It boost your page popularity, higher reading time since your subscriber is those audience who loves your content.
With these, search engine will boost your page ranking.
How to Set Up RSS Feed on Your Website?
Fortunately, setting up a RSS feed on your website is a very simple process.
Let’s take a look how to do it:
1. Detect Your RSS Feed
As mentioned above, if you’re using WordPress, your site will automatically have one RSS feed in place.
Simply just by putting /feed/ after your website address, it will gave you the feed address.
Or, you can use a Google tool: FeedBurner. Simply enter your domain into the relevant field, and click on Next. You’ll see a results screen showing you every feed that’s associated with your site.
2. Redirect Your Default RSS Feed
Once you have one RSS URL, you’ll need to redirect your feed to FeedBurner.
You can use plugin such as RSS Redirect & FeedBurner Alternative.
After installing and activating this plugin, head to the RSS Redirect panel within WordPress, and select Click here to activate redirect.
This will redirect your feed in a matter of seconds. After this, all that’s left is to give your visitors a way to view your feed.
3. Display it On Your Website Front End
The final step is adding a RSS feed button on the front end of your site, so that your audience can easily add your site as their RSS feed if they like your content.
You can add it together with the sharing button after your article, or maybe on the sidebar widget.
Once done, your RSS feed is accessible to everyone and ready to go!
Why Not Using RSS?
To conclude, RSS feed is not something that we strongly encourage you to do, since it is not a critical part of SEO practice.
However, it is still good to have it as it does not provide any harm to your site.
It’s like when you found a 100 bucks on the street, and you see that there is another 5 bucks with 100 miles distance. Why not, right?
It doesn’t harm your SEO, but it gave you an additional benefit, although it is not that big.
