This isn't a spam – this is a serious question. I've got a nice (relatively new) blog set up at http://www.sundialservices.com/blog.html, which is powered by Weebly, and it has RSS-feed capability. ("W00T! W00T!")

But ... how does one promote the existence of such a feed today, given all the merging and consolidating that has lately been happening in the Internet world? How do you, pragmatically speaking, get consolidators and so-forth to know of the feed's existence ... not using guidelines that were applicable a few years ago, but today?

I truly don't know the present-day answer to this. This is an area of the Internet that's under very constant change. Hence, my question. And, lest we just wind up repeating stuff here, links to relevant, timely articles might well be most expedient. I also don't want this thread ... if it is lucky enough to get any traction at all ... to wander off into some general diatribe about internet-marketing. My question, and the topic, is fairly specific. Let's keep it that way.

To reiterate: I am not hereby "trying in a sneaky sideways way to 'promote my blog.'" (That would be S0 L0Z3R, D00D! ) Nope, this is an entirely up-front inquiry. I post a link in case you want to see exactly what I'm referring to; exactly what its technical capabilities, links, etc. actually are.

Also ... do you still use RSS feeds? Do you think that they are still useful? Are they, to you?

I'm going to pass on the rest, but I find RSS feeds very useful, but I am also surprised about how few people share that feeling. The few people who recognise them when they are mentioned seem to, somehow, feel that they are old technology (whatever is wrong with that, if the old technology does what is required) and the rest seem just uninterested in the concept, totally. Occasionally, there is some confusion with the usenet, confusing, say, the reader programs.

I really don't know why that is.

Frankly, so am I, Salasi ... and I still follow some Usenet groups (which are still very much out there). But, having said that, the RSS feeds that I receive are ones that I "stumbled upon," mostly through newsgroup and blog postings and other things. In other words, I know how I use the technology, and that I do find it useful, but I'm not sure what other people think or how the technology is used today. I had signed-up for some syndicators but they gradually died off or were absorbed by The Borg.

Personally, what I really like about RSS, in addition to the fact that it's pro-active in notifying me of things, is that the thing which it notifies me about is a "chunk" of information that's probably going to be useful to me ... versus a "tweet" or any of the other things that (used to!) make my computer or my phone go "bleep!" or "blong!" I've always liked that balance.

But ...

I recently restarted my web site, down for about three years. I remember some sites where you could submit your rss feed, and ping them every time your feed was updated. Frankly I never noticed anything significant traffic from it. Most of the traffic came from regular old search engines. And if I'm not mistaken, after time blog or RSS feeds are often crawled no matter what you do. Your page rank will go up the longer your site is up. And of course your page rank depends on other factors as well.

A couple links that might help:

Google: Webmaster Guidelines

Google: How Search Works

Good luck.

I don't really care about "page rank," anyhow. There are hundreds of millions of web pages now – millions of sites – such that you really can't hope to "rank high" in such a morass of data. Which is why I happen to like RSS. But, I've lost touch with whether or not it's considered useful today.

I subscribe to several feeds. It's one of the best ways to check for site updates. What's the other option? Email notification? Remembering to check a particular site for updates on a regular basis? I think it's still considered useful.

Yeah, me too. But is there any way to "discover" the feeds other than to stumble-upon a site and then tag it for a feed as you go? (And I do mean a targeted way, not a "keyword search," than you google-much.) There used to be good syndicators, back before the Internet turned into a world-wide marketing drone.

Not that I know of. But I'm not sure I fully understand your question. If you'll be patient with me...

Are you wondering about an RSS directory site or RSS search engine? All the content from you feed would already be in most of the common search engines, and the content would have more weight than the RSS feed.

Google Blogsearch crawls RSS feeds (i'll use blogs as an example because most of them have RSS feeds now) and then indexes the content it finds. Older posts are less likely to show up than newer posts.


I do believe page rank still matters, I'll explain why and you can point out if there's a flaw in my logic, or my facts.


If I do a search at http://duckduckgo.com for 'auction' Ebay doesn't come up in the first page of results. The sites that have the most weight have 'auction' in the title and the URL. But if I narrow it down to 'auction site' I get a page from ebay in the first page of results.

If you have unique content, and someone by chance types in a string of words that no other site has, your page is much more likely to be near the top, no matter what your PR. But if it's a string of words that many web pages contain, it's less likely to come up if your PR is low.

I'll use my site for another example. The title is "Mental Dimensions." The complete title tag is "Mental Dimensions | Tales of Fantasy for a New Generation."

Typing 'Mental Dimensions' will bring up my site as the first result. The fact that my domain name is the same as the title

http://mentaldimensions.net/

adds to the weight. If I simply type in 'Tales of Fantasy,' my site is lost somewhere in the results. But if change that to something more unique 'Tales of Fantasy for a New Generation," there is my web site again at the top (or below the ads in this case).

If my web site had a higher PR, the search string Tales of Fantasy' would probably be sufficient for it to be in the first page of results or near the top.

As for all the determing factors of Page Rank, that's beyond the scope of me or this post.

Your question: The best way I know of is to get people aware of a feed is display the feed URL on the web site. And people generally use search engines to find content, or follow links from other web sites.

Interesting thoughts. I guess that I like "the duck" because you don't automatically get "a word from our $pon$or" on page one.

Thanks for your insights.

I like and use RSS. But, to promote the best way is to $pend? Takes it to make it... not that time isn't money but it's a huge market.