Filed Under: Articles, SEO News, Linking Strategy
Honestly, this is the lamest attempt of an “innovation” I’ve seen in quite a while. This is just yet another JavaScript RSS/XML aggregator, but it’s hooked up to the SERPS and is made by Google - so it must be great. Sarcasm ahead.
Google Related Links use the power of Google to automatically bring fresh, dynamic and interesting content links to any website. Webmasters can place these units on their site to provide visitors with links to useful information related to the site’s content, including relevant news, searches, and pages.
These JavaScript aggregators are everywhere on the net, and many misinformed site owners actually buy the “fresh, dynamic content”.
The only thing the Google Related Links is good for is to send your visitors to other competing sites - which is obviously a great thing if you’re not too concerned about visitor retention or is concerned about bandwidth usage - after all, less visitors equals less bandwidth usage equals less hosting fees, thus saving you a lot of money.
In addition, you’ll get less click thoughs on your AdSense and you’ll give Google more traffic where they monetize instead of you. Pretty sweet deal, eh?
No - If you want to get real fresh and dynamic content on your site or blog that also offers real value to your site in the eyes of the search engines, you need an aggregator that actually outputs real HTML.
So, for starters, we are probably looking for a PHP script that does this. An ASP script would be nice, but I think most sites that are interested in this are running PHP.
These are my requirements:
- It must be free
- It must be easy to implement for the webmaster
- Preferably able to display multiple feeds
- Preferably able to set # of “feed posts” (i.e. # of articles the feed displays”)
I did find a really nice script, it’s made for WordPress as a plug-in, but since I can’t find the web site for this WordPress plugin anymore, you can download the RSS Processor from SEO Bomb.
All you have to do is to upload to the server in your plugin folder and add this line into the page you want to display the feed on:
{ rss uri=http://www.seobomb.com/feed/rss/ count=5 }
Where URI=the Feed link and Count=# of posts
If you want to display other feeds, all you have to do is to add the same “tag” with a different feed URL, and you can view a test page with a selection of SEO RSS feeds here
It took me about 2 minutes to set up, including finding the feeds, and something like this, with perhaps a PHP include instead of the WP template thingy would be ideal for non-WordPress based sites as well.
That’s what you have MagPie and RSS2HTML for - and if you look, Im sure you could find a completely free RSS Aggregator for ASP, .Net, ColdFusion or whatever technology’s driving your site. I used RSS2HTML for years on one of my old sites, and it worked like a charm.
And that’s it - free and fresh content and real value in the search engines!
Sverre Sjøthun
2 Comments so far
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Another easy RSS to html solution is to use one of the online aggregators providing this service. This generaly requires only to include a small javascript in your page (just like adsense).
Example of such services :
newsfarm.net (works both with preexisting feeds and aggregated custom feeds made from queries)
feedostyle.com (works only with preexisting feeds).
By lole on 05.19.06 5:25 pm | Permalink
You seem to completely miss my point. The JavaScript does not add any value in the search engines whatsoever cause they don’t output HTML. Without that, the SEs cannot index them.
By Sverre on 05.19.06 5:56 pm | Permalink
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