Jul 29, 2007
Feedburner was bought by Google for a rumoured $100 million on June 3, 2007. Since it was in the news, I decided to investigate its services.
As is normal with Google takeovers, what used to be paid services are now free. I have submitted the SearchMasters RSS feed http://www.searchmasters.co.nz/articles/rss/ to Feedburner, who have then enabled it to be accessed via http://feeds.feedburner.com/Searchmasters. However, it does not look that friendly to have the url as someone elses url. So the now free service has allowed me to set a cname in my dns settings to allow the url rss2.searchmasters.co.nz/SearchMasters to be used instead. Rather slick!!!
So what else is Feedburner able to provide? You are able to combine several feeds into one feed, it automatically pings services such as Technorati and Google Blog feeds which is great since this does not yet come standard with SearchMasters JoJo CMS. You can have a nice little graphic that flicks through the latest 5 items in the feed.
I now have the new RSS link in my webpage head section - now to get a few people to subscribe to it!!! The counter does not look nice when its showing zero subscribers. Please save me and subscribe to the feed - a big fat zero on the RSS Feed Statistics does not look hot ;)
post a comment
Comments
Robert - Aug 25, 2007
Hi Michael,
I have a questions maybe you can help me with.
What are your views on the issue of RSS feeds and duplicate content?
Many sources say that RSS feeds can help your SEO a lot by producing fresh content, however if i look at the situation all i see is bunch of links with optimized text pointing to the feed holders website. Surely this benefits them more then you, right?
Also, what about duplicate content? You cant change the content of the feeds layout, or headings to customise the feeds to bypass duplicate content, or can you? Surely with every body getting feeds for there website from the same source will result in Google seeing multiple web pages witht he same content? or not?
Michael Brandon - Search Masters - Aug 25, 2007
You point out some very interesting things.
Yes, people using your RSS feeds as content for their website will have the risk of creating duplicate content. There is the risk that your pages or theirs will not show because of they are considered duplicate.
However, when I use RSS feeds (to copy others content programatically) I place different text around the title = search phrase, and have a unique opening paragraph, and so have unique content as much as it possible.
I also consider that Google is getting smarter at knowing what is duplicate in such instances.
But yes, its still a risk.
Robert - Aug 27, 2007
Hmm, just as i thought.. I assume that at the moment google analyses the whole page and if out of that page like 60% of is is the same, they will penalise for DC? its tricky to know what they are up to though, and like you say, at any moment they can just post a new algorythm that changes everything..
Cheers
Michael
Michael Brandon - Aug 27, 2007
How Google has treated article duplication websites has been interesting. I have helped out with creating formula for such sites and it has worked for a while. Within the last year or so, Google has wisened up to even the intro paragraph being different as compared to the body of the document.
I still say that intro paragraphs should be different, and that can still work. But I have read lots of comment saying that such "article duplication" needs to have paragraphs reversed, rewritten, ... to get around such the Google formula.
Which brings us back to RSS Feeds - it starts to get the flavour of not adding 100% of your article into an RSS feed. Probably should be that "less than 60%" that you are talking about. It is really risky territory.
Michael Brandon - Search Engine Optimisation - Aug 28, 2007
Since we are on the subject, I happened to be wandering around the web...
Check out the Google blog and its statements about duplicate content.
My comments about "risky territory" certainly hold true. They even went to the extent of saying that when large websites take your content, you should ask them to robots.txt / meta robots it so your original article is not effected!
Michael Brandon - Search Engine Optimisation - Sep 4, 2007
I asked the question at SEO expert Dan Thies's blog - should there be the full blog post in your RSS feed. His answer was:
Google Proxy Hacking: -