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Added on 12/05/07 by
Kris |
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I can tell you. It all depends on what people are searching for.
Painfully obvious, right?
Well, not so much when someone searches at Google for intitle:"chocolate" ext:rss. The odds are astronomically high that even chocolate experts weren't even returned as results. See for yourself.
So what does this mean? It means that someone searched Google for a RSS feed (ext:rss) with the word chocolate in the title (intitle:"chocolate").
Yes, the search is more advanced than a keyword or phrase based search but that isn't my full point. The reason that it matters is that not only did this individual search for chocolate but also culture and abba. Not quite sure what it says about the person searching for those topics . . .
So for me, these three hits matter. They are three more than I would have normally received for those topics and a chance for me to get them to possibly subscribe to those feeds, subscribe to my podcast, click an ad (yes, I like money) or get my brand in front of them.
I am able to do this with keyword feeds that I create dynamically from posts that get the same SEO treatment that a normal webpage would get.
The other plus for this type of search is the fact that they return so few results and Croncast happens to be ranked #1 for most of them including searches like, say . . . "CNN" or "Micorsoft" or "iTunes".
I've had conversations with a friend, Rick Klau, about RSS feeds being indexed in Google search results. Most of those discussions focused on my saying that feeds should show up in search results and Rick saying that they shouldn't.
My stance is that some people, like myself, benefit from these results the same way that we benefit from a normal click through to our sites. I am able to do this by checking where the individual who clicked through is coming from and displaying a web page instead of the RSS with the exact same data that was in the feed.
But I don't stop there. I also make sure to let the user know how they got to the page and that they can now subscribe to that feed. It's a soft landing for what traditionally has been a hard look at XML or ugly feed displays in browsers. Which is where you will end up with 99.9 out of 100 feeds if you click through them when returned in a search.
What is Rick's position? If 99.9 are bad then they should be removed. For the time being I will agree that he is right. But that doesn't mean that this is the way it always has to be.
A couple of things could change this:
1) The uptake of RSS since IE7 and and FireFox now display their own XSLT to prettify the XML. Sort of like FeedBurner does.
2) Publishers add their own XSLT for their feeds
3) Publishers using blogs, most of which are dynamically generated, are written with code that can check for referers like Goolge, Live and Yahoo and redirect the user to a page that has the same content as the feed
4) My favorite. Google could create their own XSLT document that loads the feed into it.
Maybe that was more than a couple but I believe there are a lot of ways to welcome feeds into indexed search results beyond having to type in a search like intitle:"Google" ext:rss.
By the way, I'm not number one on this one Google is with it's YouTube property.
Next up, how to create RSS feeds with keywords in the title, how to get the .rss extension added to your feeds and landing pages for feeds.
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