How to use RSS correctly
There is no doubt in my mind that RSS is here to stay. RSS is a
simple and effective means of communicating your message to your
visitors without invading their privacy or spamming them. It has
many benefits over email and there have been many reports of the
death of email due to the continual rise of mass spamming and
non delivery due to spam filters. By no means is email dead, it
is still the best personal communication method besides picking
up the phone. It's just that RSS does some things much better
than email.
I have been informing and educating webmasters about RSS since I first discovered
the potential of this medium. A whole industry has now grown up
around RSS and now there are d
irectories that specialise in listing RSS feeds and tools
to help you create RSS feeds. Everyone seems to be jumping on
the bandwagon and everybody seems to have their own opinions
about how RSS should be used. Even Google has joined in to offer
adsense
in RSS feeds.
The problem I see is that improper use of RSS may well send RSS
the way of email. Currently it seems that if you publish an RSS
feed the contents of that feed seem to be considered public
domain. The reasons for this is, I believe, to do with the way
content is packaged in RSS, this makes the content easy to
syndicate. It is not that difficult to create a script or
desktop application to strip out the content of RSS feeds and
publish them on someone else's website. There is even a few
applications being sold for just this purpose.
This has lead to what I consider improper use of RSS feeds to
spam the search engines, this seems to be aimed particularly at
Google. Although not yet widespread yet many webmasters are
cottoning on to the fact that they can get easy content for
their websites without putting in much effort. Although off hand
this may not seem detrimental to you, consider the long term
consequences. Your feed copied hundreds if not thousands of
times and no back links to your site as the links have been
stripped. What if Google decides to penalise due to duplicate
content, the consequences could be that your site is dropped
from Googles listings.
After considering such a scenario I have come up with a few
suggestions. Firstly only publish a teaser paragraph in your
feed that links back to the main article. Although some may
disagree with me as they prefer the full article in the feed, I
truly believe RSS is better suited to notification type
messages. Secondly you can publish some terms in your feed which
states that the contents are personal use only and you should be
contacted for syndication rights. While this will not stop those
determined to copy the content of your RSS feed it will help
raise awareness of the issue.