How Is Yahoo Using Your RSS Feed?
The format for the site submission has changed in the free
Yahoo web submissions http://submit.
search.yahoo.com/free/request . At first it allowed you to
submit your site to it using the free submission form. This was
normally the home page, and you would hope that their spider
would crawl the rest of your website from there. Some webmasters
have found this inadequate and have submitted other pages that
Yahoo failed to notice otherwise.
More recently Yahoo allowed you to put in a text document with
a list of URL's to simplify the submission process.
A few weeks ago I noticed that Yahoo also allows RSS feeds of
your website, Atom feeds, or a text listing of urls in this
submission form. What does this mean? What will Yahoo do with
the links in the RSS feed?
The text list of URL's was obviously an effort to simplify the
process for Yahoo to find all the pages in a website, as their
documentation describes. But the RSS? Will they just add this to
their database of RSS feeds for RSS searches, or will they
follow the links with their spider to evaluate all the pages
listed?
I have been working with Google Sitemaps since they came out.
(Google uses their XML-formatted Google Sitemaps to help
discover all the pages in a website, as well as to evaluate what
pages have changed recently.) I am wondering if this is Yahoo's
response to the Google Site Maps. Does anyone know?
If I was them, then I would use RSS feeds to evaluate changes
in the website. This has more information than the list of
URL's, since it also has descriptions and date changed. They
have all the right information. If this is the case, it would be
advisable for webmasters to have a RSS feed for their whole site
to submit. That way Yahoo could just check the feed and know
what pages to re-crawl, or what pages have been added.
It could be just as possible that this is just a field for us
to submit RSS feeds, in addition to the other pages in your
website. If this is the case, then we may need to submit both
the feed and the home page of the website.
For myself, unless I find out differently, I am going to submit
both. I intend on having a Google Sitemap and a RSS feed on all
my future websites. I think it is safest to help out the search
engines in any way possible. If they want information on what
files have changed, I want to be proactive in giving it to them.
In addition, for those who have the coding experties, it is
advisable to automate pinging Yahoo when your RSS feed changes.
This is a standard blogging technique.
If you use movable type, the following article will help you
configure your Yahoo to be automatically notified of a change in
your RSS feed: http:/
/jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001490.html . There is an
alternate way, for those who don't have movable type or standard
blogs. Lets say you want Yahoo to know about the RSS feed you
built for http://www.yourwebsiteurl.co
m and have the RSS file, myRss.xml. You could
automate (or even have a web shortcut for) the following HTTP
request: http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://www.you
rwebsiteurl.com/myRss.xml
For more information, see the official Yahoo documention on RSS
here: http://publisher.yahoo
.com/rssguide