Sebastian’s Pamphlets

Seeing Ms. Googlebot’s sister running wild on RSS feeds, I’m going to assume that RSS feeds may become a valuable tool to support Google’s fresh and deep crawls. Test it for yourself:

Create a RSS feed with a few unlinked or seldom spidered pages which are not included in your XML sitemap. Add the feed to your personalized Google Home Page (’Add Content’ -> ‘Create Section’ -> Enter Feed URL). Track spider accesses to the feed and the included pages as well. Most probably Googlebot will request your feed more often than Yahoo’s FeedSeeker and similar bots. Chances are that Googlebot-Mozilla is nosy enough to crawl at least some of the pages linked in the feed.

That does not help a lot with regard to indexing and ranking, but it seems to be a neat procedure helping the Googlebot sisters spotting fresh content. In real life add the pages to your XML sitemap, link to them and acquire inbound links…

To test the waters, I’ve added RSS generation to my Simple Google Sitemaps Generator. This tool reads a plain page list from a text file, and generates a dynamic XML sitemap, a RSS 2.0 site feed and a hierarchical HTML site map.

Related article on Google’s RSS endeavors: Why Google is an RSS laggard

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google Sitemaps RSS

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Yesterday I’ve spotted again how jokes become rumors. It happens every day and sometimes it even hurts. In my post The Top-5 Methods to Attract Search Engine Spiders I was joking about bold dollar signs driving the MSN bot crazy. A few days later I discovered the first Web site making use of the putative ‘$$-trick’. To make a sad story worse, the webmaster has put the dollar signs as hidden text.

This reminds me to the spreading of the ghostly robots revisit META tag. This tag was used by a small regional canadian engine for local indexing in the stone age of the Internet. Today every free META tag generator on the net produces a robots revisit tag. Not a single search engine is interested in this tag. It was never standardized. But it’s present on billions of Web pages.

This is how bad advice becomes popular. Folks read nasty tips and tricks on the net and don’t apply common sense when they implement it. There is no such thing as free and good advice on the net. Even good advice on a particular topic can result in astonishing effets when applied outside its context. It’s impossible to learn SEO from free articles and posts on message boards. Go see a SEO, it’s worth it.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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