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2 comments | 4 hours ago
Full RSS Feeds Won't Get You Banned
By Jason Lee Miller - Thu, 07/24/2008 - 11:54
Another Google theory debunked
Toads cause warts; new clothes on Easter bring good luck; and Google penalizes sites for having full RSS feeds. MentalFloss.com issued a "never mind" on that last superstition after Matt Cutts dropped a little science.
Pay any attention at all in this industry and you'll find desperate Web marketers and publishers grasping at any explanation of why their site has suddenly been delisted from Google's search rankings. As all of us know, that's the Power of the Goog.
MentalFloss found a correlation and went with it: Friendly experts suggested their sudden demise in the search results was because of their use of full RSS feeds, which made it easier for scrapers to grab content, post it on their splogs, thus creating duplicate content, thus ending in a serious delisting penalty for MentalFloss.
The explanation was sent to RSS readers along with notice that articles appearing in the feed would only carry a headline teaser and a link, thanks to Google's aggressive treatment of duplicate content. That's an interesting assessment, to say the least. If scrapers can tank your site, WebProNews would have been offline long ago. Scrapers love us!
Turns out though, they missed an important email. Google's webspam captain, Matt Cutts, whose job lately seems to involve a lot of mythbusting, commented his team had sent MentalFloss an email on July 7th explaining the penalty:
The reason that Mental Floss was gone from Google’s index was because we believed that the site had been hacked. We tried to send you an email to that effect on July 7th to let you know that because of the hacked content on Mental Floss, we were temporarily removing the site from Google.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with RSS full-text feeds. I happily use full-text feeds on my personal blog, for example, and recommend that others feel free to do the same.
Thus ends one debate and opening another about which are better: full RSS feeds or partials. Cutts joins the expert camp who preach a lot about full feeds being better for the end-user. The other side note how much full feeds reduce their traffic, ad visibility (unless an ad is slipped into the feed itself), and ability to track readers.
From this RSS reader's perspective, I like partial feeds. I'm a headline scanner who will gladly pop open 15 tabs to read the rest of articles that grab my interest. Full feeds, with their scroll, scroll, scroll your screen, get in the way of my scanning efficiency.
FriendFeed Offers Real-Time SearchResults Actually Roll In
2 comments | 4 hours ago
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25 Comments
Write the RSS content to a table?
I recently added a small section on my site DamnIneedAjob.com where I interpret an RSS feed and write it’s content to a table. I then display the feed from that table via an asp page. Is that an acceptable practice?
~Larry
Cafe Paylaşım
thanks
Question!
Can you help me? How can i get Full content Rss feed?
after I add some rss feed website, it show "read more" word. So I want to change read more to complete full content.
Du you know some software or plugin at wordpress to show full rss content?
I don't use RSS feeds on my site
I don't use RSS feeds on my site. What I want to say is that I prefer partial RSS feeds to full ones. From the RSS feed headlines I only choose the ones which interests me and that saves me a lot of time.
rss feeds
I agree Is far as I can tell never had any problems with search engines and rss feeds
What about widgets that supply RSS Feeds?
I have noticed that since I have added a widget RSS Feed to my site - Self Defense Products Florida my site has went from page one to page two on many keywords. Could this just be a coincidence or does anyone think RSS Feeds from Widgets are being penalized? Also, would this be considered a partial or full feed?? Thanks for any feedback...
Maybe some help for you
You might find this link useful
wordpress.org/support/topic/205699
RSS Questions Answered Thanks
Good topic, and explanation.
Simple to complex works for me:
No one reads over 5 lines of an email and probably the same for a feed. If I'm interested I'll pursue the link.
Do you get 'full' content credit from the feeds you host or just partial with search engines?
Also curious if blockquoted content credits back to the author or to the site referencing the content? (From a search engine's viewpoint)
Duplicate Content - RSS and syndication?
I have syndicated my blogs to another blog host and they appear as full text with the words: [original post by .....]
I am wondering whether this would be considered duplicate content? It is so hard to tell what is considered DC and what is not???
Stores need full RSS feeds, blogs should use partials
I use full RSS feeds on my store but partials for the blogs. I think Jason is right in preferring partials feeds for blogs. I use my oscommerce fork SEOPerfectCart to submit my stores full RSS feed to GoogleBase, but only submit partial feeds for my blogs to the blog directories. It would be nice to give someone the full story on their RSS reader but if they do not visit your site the feed wont be their very long. As far as products are concerned the description in the RSS feed may lead them to click and check it out.
would my site penalized?
My site use many RSS feeds for forum,chatbox, other stuffs etc?
Would my site get penalized?
Oh!I am afraid. :(
Yes, the all too common
Yes, the all too common finding a boogey man under the bed.
Thanks for debunking another one of those myths around the internet.Albert Einstein
fabulous
I'd suggest that the real winner from this story is Matt. The fact that he bothered to mail someone about his site speaks volumes about what he does and the way he goes about it.
Thank you for the information re:RSS Feed
Glad to read your info, thank you and Best wishes ! Angel
Nice! it removes the misconception
helpfull articl as it removes the misconception I also like partial feeds as a headline scanner these days one goes into full detail only if it is interesting.
RSS Feed ~ Leather Motorcycle Vests
I have RSS feed on my web page : http://www.dynamicleather.com where I sell leather motorcycle jackets, leather vests, leather chaps. But I have no problem with it.
Regards,
William
404-729-3965
Damn straight
I spent way too much time looking into this issue and at the end of lots of testing from several domains serving on different material turned out that a full feed is not only better due to the advertising it brings but its just less hassle over all in my own opinion.
RSS Titles with Summarys Win the Day
I agree with Allister and Chris. RSS feeds should be displayed as title and summary. Anything more will take away from your users experience. Unless, your entire site is a feed and there are a few of those.
It is interesting to note that of the 300 web sites who have registered to use our FeedSweep widget to display feeds only 1 displays more than title and summary.
To end the debate - base this decision on your site visitors reactions.
Really annoying
This debate about Partial or Full RSS Feeds is really becoming annoying, I spent the last three days reading articles about this issue, it seems a personal issue more than ,for me I prefer partial feeds but some of my reader may prefer full feeds, so I really can't decide.
I'm going to find some way to satisfy all parts, those who like partial feeds and who like full feeds and add it as a new feature to my service.
Summaries
Like Allister said, RSS means summary, not full story. All my blogs and the blogs we do for clients are on summary. If someone is unwilling to click on the headline to get the rest of the story, how likely are they to click on anything else I have to offer?
Sidenote: I'm sure glad the captcha only asked me what 1 + 1 is. If you see this comment I was able to get that one right. :)
Off the Subject
Chris, your sidenote is very funny :) I had to stop by and tell you that, and sorry if this off the subject, we need to laugh some times :) still I'm annoyed with this Full VS Partial feed debates and 3+2 equals 5 :P
That's what it was designed
That's what it was designed for ....RSS... "RDF Site Summary" ... to be a remote index of content at a particular url. Its function changed when the Simple Syndication peeps started using the description element for content.
Full Feeds Won't Get You Banner
They may have sent mental floss an email on July 7th... but, in all likelihood it was filtered out by their email server's spam filters.
Rss
Thanks for this post. It allays some of my fears related to full rss. You made a point about browsing there. I like to read the eye catching headlines rather than browsing the full page. If I like the topic, I clik to read the rest of the article.
Full RSS XML SiteMaps
Does this also apply to RSS Sitemaps?
i.e. if we have a full RSS Site Map with multiple Blog tags (which an XML SiteMap generator will create) - will this also be treated in the same way in Webmaster tools on Google?
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