Including RSS content into your site is like chocolate. It’s like chocolate in the way that Forrest Gump meant it. "You never know what you're gonna get." We all use a little RSS here and there to spice up our sites and it usually involves pulling in local or real estate related information for your visitors’ consumption but too of much of good thing can be bad. Just like chocolate.

Need a refresher course on what RSS is and how Realtors can use it? Check out this article.

Need to knwo how to pull RSS feeds on your website?  Read Pulling RSS Feeds with Simple Pie

• Increases the SEO value of a website
• Boost pages indexed
• Provides fresh relevant content automatically
• Improves the "long tail" of search visitors

Now, before I dive head-long into this topic I will say, I love RSS feeds, I pull them on my own sites and on client sites, heck, the name of the company is RSS Pieces. And most of what we know about using RSS is that including external RSS feeds increases site stickiness, makes a site more appealing, makes it “fresh.” But “freshness” can come at a price if feeds are pulled chaotically.  If you decide to use RSS feeds to build site content automatically you must have a solid strategy. You must learn to use RSS feeds like a surgeon uses his scalpel; just enough to make an incision but never leave a scar.

PROBLEM: RSS feeds can hinder visitor retention. RSS feeds are excerpts from articles on other sites that you can display on your own site to build content and provide additional information about local news and events or the real estate market. However, when a visitor wants to read the entire article for that feed they have to click a link that will direct them off of your site and back to the original story of on another site. For example, click on any article on this page. Clearly, the problem with this is that you just lost a visitor that may or may not come back to your site!  (NOTE: there are also some sites that provide RSS feeds in full, not just excerpted feeds on your site- stay away from these- you will trip Goggle's duplicate content filters- always use excerpted feeds!)

• SOLUTION: Separate RSS feeds from your “unique” content so visitors will not be confused and accidentally get directed off site when they are not expecting it. For example, since I use RSS feeds for local information, news and weather, I make sure I have categories for “local information,” “news” and “weather” where those feeds can be displayed together- away from my unique content on the home pages or pages with buyer and seller information. Always group RSS feeds together on inner pages so users will not be surprised if they are directed off site. This helps build your site’s credibility among visitors while providing a structured and comfortable user experience. People like to be guided, we like to be shepherded through the user experience and generally we don’t like being directed off site unexpectedly. You want to make sure that you never put RSS feeds into places where your best prospects might be directed off site like your content meant explicitly for buyers and sellers.

PROBLEM: RSS feeds can dilute SEO. No matter how good the queries that your developer built to pull your RSS feeds are, there is always the possibility that your scripts may pull a miscellaneous feed that will dilute your SEO. For example, on my fitness site, I pull feeds from Bodybuilding.com on both strength training and nutrition. One day, I saw that the strength training feed was pulling an article detailing a murder investigation because it involved a bodybuilder. Consider what that feed did to my keyword density and overall SEO on my site that day. Clearly, there was no way for me to have ever anticipated that I would need to include the word “murder” in my filter. But, that is a good example demonstrating how not having full control over the outside content can cause unexpected results.

• SOLUTION: Check a website’s reputation and carefully craft queries for pulling feeds. While there are completely unforeseen situations that can arise from time to time like my little fitness faux pas, most situations are avoidable. If you are pulling a general feed from Google, carefully craft your queries to pull feeds that are less likely to include miscellaneous material and dilute your SEO while also filtering out anything that may have illicit content. If you are pulling a feed from a third party website, carefully review the site’s content and reputation to make sure that the site meets with your ethical standards and is a reputable source for an RSS feed. By simply being vigilant in your due diligence on the sites you are pulling feeds from you can avoid much heartache.

PROBLEM: RSS feeds can pollute validation.  Not every site owner or developer is a perfectionist, meaning not everybody writes valid code that complies with W3C standards so search engines can read it fully and browsers can display it uniformly. When you pull a feed from an outside source, you are at the mercy of the other website’s resources and developers. I can’t tell you how many times I have pulled invalidated feeds that cause a perfectly valid site to throw errors. To read more about why validation is important, click here.

• SOLUTION: To “clean” third party RSS feeds for display o your site, you need a developer to write some pretty complex custom validation code. OK, this solution ain’t pretty- there simply isn’t an easy way to do it and even the hard way isn’t always perfect. This is often more trouble than it is worth, but if you care about validation the way we do at RSS Pieces, you’ll do it. We use validation code to “clean” the feeds pulled so that the code appearing on our site and client sites is validated as best as possible which of course, is to say, almost always but not quite! Sometimes you can’t anticipate every crazy way some other developer will write code, but you can come close.

PROBLEM: RSS feeds on a home page can hinder search engine crawls. When a search engine begins their crawl of your website or blog, they start at your home page. You want a search engine to crawl you deeply- so a good rule of thumb is to limit RSS feeds to inner pages, so you can assist a search engine with a deeper crawl of your site. You do not want to start directing a search engine off of your site right at the get go. Remember, search engine’s aren’t that smart and too many feeds on a homepage can look like a link farm, news aggregator or an ad spam RSS fed content sites. 

• SOLUTION:  Do not pull RSS feeds on “home” pages where search engines begin their indexing tasks. A deep crawl is a crawl that goes many links deep on your own site. Interesting fact: Search engines will only index a finite number of links on a page.   They will chose to follow some links and not other, some engines, like Google will even choose to not index pages all together if they have too many links. The agreed upon limit for links on any page is 100. This limit includes all links on a single page- internal, external and RSS feeds. You’d be surprised how quickly you reach that number with large sites! So, don’t clutter the most important page of your site with unnecessary RSS feeds which will confuse both search engines and users.

Now, while I do all these things, sometimes, yes, even I occasionally pull invalidated code or miscellaneous material that impacts my SEO. That is the rub with RSS feeds. There really is no escaping it. You are not in control of the content you are pulling- someone else wrote the code and the content- you are at their mercy. So, while pulling an RSS feed from another site or using a custom feed from Google news is a free way to build content on your site, take the proper steps to ensure that those free content building methods are not devaluing your site to users or search engines.

1. Group RSS feeds into their own categories away from your unique content.
2. Carefully review sites from which you pull your feeds to ensure they meet with your ethical standards for their content
3. Carefully craft your feed pulls and filters for pulling Google News feeds to avoid accidentally pulling content that would impact SEO or contain illicit material
4. Use custom code to “clean” validation errors in the RSS feeds
5. Avoid using RSS feeds on your home page

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