RSS: Rich Site Summary and its Past

Rich Site Summary. It is the same subject that we touched on earlier as RSS and we showed the definition as Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary on the previous article. However, Rich Site Summary was the original name RSS was acronym for, and knowing that might shade more light into what RSS is exactly, even if what we are interested in is the second version that is, Really Simple Syndication, because that is what is going to help with the site ranking in the search engines, the subject matter that we will be talking on for the foreseeable future, that is until we exhaust what is involved in doing an effective business from a particular Web site. The former one was in use mostly by news portals to disseminate whatever content they were coming up at a given interval to those who they designate as recipients of those new and frequently changing contents, mostly subscribers. That process is modified and applied to help sites get more incoming link, and it is accomplished by starting a blog, submit the blog’s RSS feed to various indexes or aggregators like for example www.feedburner.com so that these indexes will add the blog RSS feed into their list. Whenever the blog posts a new material all of them will show it on their index and the probability of some of them being found by search engine spiders is high, and that would be considered as an incoming link.

Not only that if you are going to post fresh material on your blog site about a given subject matter, you need to be informed about it in a regular basis, and in fact the main task aggregator indexes accomplish is just that. You inform them what kind of information you are looking for or even particular keywords or phrases, and they would gather the most current occurrences of the particular information and put it in one place where you can go and see it, or they can send it to a desktop or a Web site. In the process, the activity will end up attracting search engine spiders that are scouring the Web for new content, leaping from one link to the other, and the end result is getting more link popularity for your site, because as long as your site is mentioned in any high ranked Web sites by Google it adds to the link popularity of your site. For sites that are new and not indexed, it will speedup the process much.

The robots have their own complicated way of ranking sites that is similar to link popularity, which is mainly based on content, reciprocal links, and their value. Consequently, you could be doing two things simultaneously. You will develop more authority on the subject matter you are writing on and that by itself will have you finish ahead of the pack. This process will create a lot of activity that the spiders will find out eventually, which will add to the link popularity of the blog, and that improves the rank of the site that the blog is linked with as well as the blog itself. Its being indexed and ranked higher translate into driving more traffic to your site.

If you are putting fresh content on your Web site regularly, you can create your own RSS feed file, upload it to your server, and submit the RSS feed to the various indexes, and when the aggregators that are sniffing for XML/RSS files find out that a change had been made on your site, every change will be reflected on their index file, and again the particular search engine spiders that you are interested in will come across these fresh postings the dates stamped on them. That will add to your incoming link popularity and how this materializes is, your site will not stay stagnant for a long period of time, depending on the popularity of the incoming links it could go up and down on a monthly basis or even more frequently. And having a good position for a month or so could accomplish a lot depending on what you are doing on your site, because it is always possible that your site could be outranked by other sites that meet the requirements better.

Google for example had introduced what is called Site Maps, and the idea behind it is if you have a site whose content changes frequently, and if you want the new version of this site to be displayed in the search engines, by putting an XML/RSS file that you can download from Google’s Web site in your webserver you can make Googlebot visit your site more frequently, whenever you make a content change, that is more than the twice a month visit it makes regularly, and that is known to improve the rank of a site.