How to get backlinks and increased site exposure using RSS

Daniel McGonagle

Hi my name is Daniel McGonagle, and this is my first guest author post on Garry’s blog.  I appreciate Garry giving me the opportunity to discuss how to get traffic, backlinks and increased sites exposure using RSS technology.

Let’s skip the definitions of RSS and focus on how it will benefit you and your websites.

The last “S” in RSS stands for Syndication, and all websites owners should strive for syndication of their content, but there are myths out there about content syndication, especially with RSS feeds.

Content Syndication Myths:

There’s a duplicate content penalty when my content gets sent out to too many places at once

That’s simply not true, especially when you’re using RSS, RSS feeds, and RSS technology to merely syndicate your content in snippets form.  In most cases, when your main site feed is submitted to the RSS aggregator directories, they merely display a description of the content item and a backlink to the original post or a redirect to somewhere else on their site that eventually sends visitors to your destination url.

NOTE: If you’ve ever wondered what the real truth is about Duplicate Content Penalties, you can do some tests on your own that will give you the rock-solid undeniable, prove-able answer.

RSS sites will overshadow my original content because they’re higher-ranked, more authoritative sites.

If this is indeed the case, it won’t be that way for long, because the more backlinks you get from all these different RSS directories, the more authoritative your site becomes.  Therefore, if your feed items that get indexed by the RSS directories DO outrank your site url, it’s only a temporary thing and at some point it will lead to your gaining multiple page One positions in the SERPs for long tail items.

RSS backlinks are worthless since most sites don’t even get my feeds indexed

Yes, this is true in some cases because some RSS directories and “feed handlers” don’t direct link to your sites and only offer NoFollow backlinks evne if they did directly link to your feed items.

You should read Garry’s guest author post on Feedage and my review on Feedage to better understand that not all RSS Feed directories are created equal.  A lot of people use Feedburner to handle their RSS readership but I challenge you to find your feedburner site feed url in the SERPs and see if its indexed (it won’t be).

So while a lot of webmasters are sending their redirected link juice to Feedburner, Feedburner isn’t returning the “link luv”… and this is such a waste.  Google runs Feedburner, and they don’t index your feeds for fear that indexed your feeds interferes and competes with their search listings, and that makes sense because more conversions can be expected from SITES than feed listings.

RSS syndicates content snippets

Since RSS feeds submitted to directories is basically a snippet-syndication, back-linking mechanism, you want to apply massive leverage by submitting your RSS feeds to as many places as possible.  There’s no “danger” of duplicate content issues here because all of these directories are on different IP classes and subnets, and they’re only providing displaying (and hopefully indexing..) your content.

This is a no-brainer method to add backlinks that develop into increased exposure for your sites.

However, the vast majority of webmasters don’t even implement the basic RSS strategies, and even those who do are still missing out on one very important yet little-known tactic

Next Up (tomorrow):  What most webmasters don’t know about RSS submissions strategies.

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