If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you know I’ve been on a bit on an RSS feed kick lately, doing a lot of reading, research and thinking on how best to incorporate RSS into your backlinks strategy.
Some Facts you might not know about RSS feeds and handling of your RSS readership:
1- It’s not a good idea to host your feed on your site in the default domainname.com/feed area because it usually has a noindex/nofollow attribute assigned to it, and doesn’t present a nice interface for handling and accumulating RSS readership.
2- The most popular feed handler has been feedburner for a long time because it has a nice interface, provides easy to understand tracking features, and basically has a lot of features that could be useful for you. But feedburner doesn’t index your feed, nor do they “follow” your links inside the hosted feed.
3- Feedage will index your feed and provides DoFollow backlinks from your feed hosted with them, to urls listed in the feed. According to Mark at feedage, some popular site feeds hosted by feedage attain Page Rank with age and frequent updating. I’ve checked this and it’s true, I’ve seen some Page Rank 4 feeds on their site.
feedage
However, some people will say,
“yeah, so what?! That PR weight is distributed across all the urls listed on the feeds page, so not much Page Rank assignation is being delivered to the urls listed on the feed…”
And I say,
“yeah, exactly, so what? Find me another feed handler that
- indexes your feed,
- provides DoFollow direct backlinks to your inner pages (no redirects)
- will list all your feeds’ urls (not just your most recent ones),
- and attain Page Rank of its own.
You can keep using your noindex nofollow feedburner, I’m feedage-ing it now, all the way…”
Making the most out of your feedage.com membership and feed/feed reader handling:
If/when you decide to make the jump over to feedage.com for the reasons listed above, try to make the most of this by
1- Change your blog reading settings to display as many content pieces in your RSS feed as possible so they all get listed in your feedage.com-hosted feed. Unlike some other feed handlers and aggregators, feedage will list all your content on one page (your feed url), not just the 10 or 20 or 30 most recent entries and submissions.
Testing shows they time out after searching for feed items for 25 seconds, and it seems like 200 feed items is the max allowed…
NOTE: You should get an account there and submit your feeds as a free member. Don’t just add a feed url without logging in. Your submitted feed won’t have Keywords in the url of your feedage feed url and willonly be a numerical url when you don’t bother to log in to your account to submit your feed.
Since your feedage feed gets indexed and has DoFollow attributions, it makes sense to take one tiny little extra step (become a free member) and do this the right way for max. benefit.
2- Build some decent quality backlinks to your feedage feed to add more link juice to your indexed and DoFollow feed. As someone mentioned to me earlier privately, the Page Rank your DoFollow feed attains is dispersed through the linked-to urls listed on your feed so you might as well increase the leverage and link juice of the feed by directing some links to it.
Promote the promoters, as they say…
3- Merge a feed. If you have several related niche sites merge those feeds into a super-niche master feed to increase the leverage obtained. Feedage provides a resource for doing this on their site, just remember to name your merged feed after your desired keywords for that niche, then promote and build backlinks to your merged feed.
NOTE: When you add a site feed to feedage.com they will name your feed after your site title, so take that into account prior to submitting your main site as a feed with them.
4- Use the RSS footer plugin by Yoast to ensure that whoever is hosting or scraping your feeds is delivering a backlinks, or an additional backlink inside your individually feed urls. What this plugin does is it inserts a backlink inside your rss listings saying something like XYZ post (hyperlinked to source) is an article/blog post from XYX site (hyperlinked with site title keywords).
5- Use Yet Another Related Posts Plugin to add even more backlinks to your displayed feed items. With YARPP there’s an option to display related posts in feeds so use that in conjunction with RSS footer to get at least 3, if not 8 backlinks per feed item display.
Using these plugins ensure that more backlinks are obtained on a per url basis, and also makes it harder for people who scrape your feed items without linking to your source content.
What feedage.com could do better:
I’m so used to seeing feedburner handling feeds and readership accumulation that I’ve been spoiled by a nice user-friendly intuitive interface. Feedage needs to dress this up a bit, provide better navigation, bigger icons etc.. that make it easier for people to see the SUBSCRIBE TO THIS FEED areas.
I got a little confused with how I was supposed to add my feeds to their system. At first glance I thought I was supposed to add their FeedTracker plugin so I could get my site listed with them, then I realized that the FeedTracker is just for allowing you to do some tracking of your feed with them.
They provide you with some html widget code for displaying your feedage feed score and also for displaying an RSS icon-like feed button that users can click to go to your feed and become a reader. The icon created with this widget needs to be bigger and hopefully feedage allows for some customization options here for the feedage icons you’d want to display on your sites.
Without a nice, big, orange-y RSS icon that says “Subscribe to this site feed”, you’re not going to get as many subscribers. I know there ar e plugins out there that will display nice looking RSS icons for you, but if I am going to display my feedage widget code and feedage score, then I’d prefer that it do two things at once, and do them both well (display score, + entice more rss readership).
I’d also like to see a feedage plugin that is like feedburner’s wordpress plugin, which offers redirect options for main site feed and main site comments feeds. Without a plugin helping out with this redirection, you’ll have to hack your theme to get the on-site links and RSS icons to redirect to your feedage.com feed.
Feedage offers an invaluable service to webmasters seeking backlinks and increased site exposure, so use their service to handle feed submissions and your rss readership.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
How often does it update? The RSS feed provided hasn’t updated since November, yet there is plenty of fresh content if I veiw the feed on it’s own and not part of a blended feed. I’ve had a look at their site, but can’t see anything that helps. It should be instanteneious, but I don’t know for sure.
It updates instantaneously.
http://www.feedage.com/feeds/7615444/link-building-link-building-services
I didn’t know feed burner was no follow and no index…thats a real bummer. As you recommended, Im making the switch to feedage.com. My only problem…I am getting the “numbered” url for my feeds. I see no where to add keywords link with feedburner.
Am I missing something? Are you supposed to use feedburner AND feedage together?
-Thanks
Hi Sean, yeah I was disappointed to find that out, too about FeedBurner. Oh well…. gotta remember that Google is a business protecting its assets, so it can’t be hosting people’s feeds and indexing them because it would cause multiple listings just from one feed item.
But yes, there’s a way to have your cake and eat it, too, if you want to continue building your RSS readership the FB handles that better than anyone else, but it you want to send some constant link juice to another feed hosting entity, then make sure it’s a Dofollow entity.
Blog have RSS, RSS 2.0 an atom feeds so there’s probably a way to send your main feed to FBurner and feedage at the same time without losing link juice or potential RSS readers
Thanks!
Another question…..
How should I handle mass RSS submission software? More specifically, which RSS URL should I input into the software?
I currently use icerocket to create custom feeds and then upload those to feedage right after. Most of my feeds are static feeds which get content from my articles and web 2.0 posts. I’m not trying to build readers so much as I am trying to get more quality backlinks and “intensify” my linking structure — and RSS seems like a fast and easy way to do it.
I noticed I can’t use the feedage URL cause thats a “webpage” according to RSS validators. So, would it be better if I use the icerocket feed URL for mass RSS submission? I know it doesn’t have any “keyword juice” in the url, but I guess I can’t have everything.
I use RSSBOT for my feed submissions. After submitting like 5 feedburner feeds using the software (and now learning that they are no index and no follow), I feel like a real birdbrain — lol.
Okay then, I hope I explained the question thoroughly enough. If not, let me know and I’ll try to elaborate further.
Thanks,
-Sean
P.S. I love your site. Saved me lots of money so far on what i “thought” was great software but turned out to be nothing but garbage with a pretty bow tied on.
P.P.S. A little off topic, but I was wondering if you know of any deals or coupons going on for Unique Article Wizard. $67 a month isn’t a “colossal” expense, but it is a little high for my taste. If you know of any deals, let me know, as I am dieing to get UAW after reading that review you’ve got posted.
Am I missing something as your rss feed on this site is Feedburner?
Also which tool can I use just to change the /feed/ url on my wordpress site to /keyword/ instead?