Blog Lesson: Feed Syndication

Publishing RSS and Atom feeds has an additional benefit. The structured nature of the feeds enable them to be easily syndicated into other web sites.

Other bloggers or web services may link to your blog by syndicating your feeds.

For example, another blogger may use your feed to display links to the five most-recent entries in your blog. This would be done in an automated way, meaning that their blogging tool would fetch your feed from time-to-time and update the links. Another example is a site that focuses on display and aggregating feeds on particular topics, bring together the feeds of various blogs in one place.

Aside: Another important reason to publish feeds is to ensure that your entries are included in feed-based search engines. This is increasing important now, (as opposed to back when I first learned about SEO and blogs), since Google has just launched a BETA version of their feed-based blog search engine. Feeds can also be used with the new, also BETA, Google Sitemaps service. Another popular feed-based search engine is Feedster. While feed-based search engines have not been a major source of web traffic to date (based on my experience), that may change in the near furture.