Nov 24, 2009
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RSS feeds have become very popular as of late for SEO and there are several reasons as to why your site should have an rss feed. Some of those reasons include that you can syndicate content and people can be notified in an instant. You can get a following of subscribers who will stay faithful to your company because of your feed.
When creating a feed you can either have only a summary of the posts show up in the feed or you can have the full posts show up. There are some people who like to only have a summary of the posts because the reader will then have to click on it to then go to the site and read more.
While that is a good reason there can also be potential problems with that. One is that you are assuming that people would want to take those necessary steps of having to click through to your site and then see all of the content on a page that looks different than the feed page.
If there are links within the posts and they are not included in the summary then you are missing out on the opportunity of having some links point back to your site from your feed.
Most feeds that do have full versions of posts usually get more subscribers because you are giving the users what they want and that is the ability to read content within the feed page at once. Some people bookmark feed pages and so you have to remember that your feeds are like an extension of your site as well.
If your company is partnered with other companies who would like to promote content to their users then they would much rather promote your content to their people with feeds that have the full version of content. Make sure you use absolute urls in your feeds so that if this does happen then people can always get back to your site. Plus it is always better to use absolute urls for seo.