So, a few of you have expressed an interest in using the RSS feeds for content on your websites and blog sites. While I think this is a good idea I want to pose a couple questions. Is the goal of this to engage the customer in your self updating pages or is this for SEO reasons? If it is just for your customers and the overall fantastic usefulness of your site then I agree. There are countless creative ways to incorporate these RSS feeds into pages that would be very impressive. However, (playing devils advocate here) if you are hoping that this will help your SEO efforts won’t this be considered duplicate content if this concept catches on? And what about the content always changing? Depending on how it is used do you really want some one else’s property description being shown as content you wrote? What are your thoughts on this?
Justin LaJoie – CEO
Diverse Solutions
Justin,
Duplicate content really only comes into play when it is all within the same domain. (if my site had several pages with the same content on them, it would flag the duplicate content penalty from Google.)
Proof of this is whenever a breaking story hits the news. Almost all news sites grab their information from a news feed that many share. If duplicate content was easy for Google to detect across various domains, you’d only find 1 news site listed in the serps.
Scott
Can you put a “no-follow” on the link to your example so they don’t get a backlink from DS?…since they are one of my competitors….lol
I agree with Scott.
Jay V
Jay, the anchor text that Justin used is “creative ways”, so it shouldn’t have any positive effects on your competitors ranking. (Unless they’re trying to rank for “creative ways”. 🙂
Scott
Thanks Scott…
I want it for both reasons. I’d like to be able to have that content update on these hyperlocal pages I’m creating such as:
http://bethesdabuzz.com/montgomery-county/real-estate-in-bethesda-md-20816/springfield/
Or if I wanted to target a particular condo development it would be nice to have all the info for that building plus all of the units for sale, solds, and market history right on one page.
I don’t wish to be critical of Laurie but that page would not be the choice I’d use for a model for the application. Perhaps something with a bit more structure.
I just stuck the RSS feed from a saved search into an iframe to see how it would handle itself over a couple of days. But I just don’t know enough about RSS to understand how it’s working! I don’t mind the format of it:
http://bethesdabuzz.com/bethesda-md-condos-for-sale/
Thanks for the chance to put in our 2 cents…
Removed – Off topic
Moderated by James – Diverse Solutions
As to the duplicate content question. The way the filters work is- it can take Google months to identify duplicate content and since RSS feeds are always changing and since Google crawls different sites at different times, rates and depths, it is unlikely that RSS feeds will get caught up in this. The best implementations of RSS feeds are micro custom searches (10-20 listings only) so you don’t start looking like a doorway page. We recommend that clients create custom searches based on property type, price range and neighborhood- this usually results in smaller feeds. The benefit of this is that the agent can over time create hundreds of such feeds and really spike their search traffic.
Josette,
FYI- you are losing 80% of the SEO value of that feed by iframing in the raw feed. Engines have a difficult time crawling inside of iframes and more importantly when you iframe- the feed is technically housed on a secondary site so the 20% of the SEO value left is given to that site (idx.diversesolutions.com), not yours. Try posting the feed directly into your site or blog. Your webmaster may need to create a custom page type so you can directly post an RSS feed like our clients can.
Here is an example of a Diverse Solutions RSS feed pulled directly on to a page for maximum SEO benefit:
http://www.denvercoloradorealestatehomes.com/centennial-rss
Mary, thanks for letting me know about the iframe and SEO. I am just starting to figure these feeds out. The Denver site is exactly the way I want to use these feeds. Small, distinct types of searches so they are easy to go through on a daily basis but with more detail than the map. And it’s formatted nicely so the listings are one after the other in an orderly fashion. That was my only criticism earlier – I’m just looking for the format of the feed to output in this nice blocked fashion.
I’m not sure what my programmer knows about feeds so I’ll have to figure that out with him. I did read through the Simple Pie docs to see how they are implementing but it’s beyond my skill in PHP. I’m hoping to see something come out of here!
Thanks…
I can tell you one thing, Google loves my Listing RSS feed page. Yes, the content changes but there is all sorts of nice keywords that are spread through them pretty consistently.
Based on traffic to the page, readers like it too. And it’s not all that well publicized on my site. Just one link in the menu bar.
It’s best use though really is I can use it as an example for prospects for explaining how setting up a feed could benefit them.
http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com/phoenix-listings-rss-feeds
I have been setting up rss feeds and doing well with them. I do believe that it is working at getting me some relative google love. we will see. i do think that it is most important that I offer the most relevant experience to each visitor. This gives them another option that might be more favorable to their tastes.
Cheers,
Rick Armstrong
http://www.realestatejackson.com
So what’s the word? Is diverse Solutions going to implement RSS feed content for or web site? If so, how soon?
All good points made by everyone. We think there is a definite us for this type of content on websites. However we are looking into different delivery methods for the best SEO and ease of use. No exact date but it is something we’d like to make available in the future to those that don’t have any programming knowledge.
So Justin, where are you at today on this important “content” topic? I am talking with your company about your idx/lead gen system to integrate into a r/e blog. I definitely want the RSS feed content on the site. I’d like to know if you have come to the conclusion yet as to how important it is for the SEO value as well as the incredible value in creating communities, projects, developments and other specific searches? Thanks.
Will you (or do you know any people/companies) that will implement a server based rss feed to html for my website. I would like to have this done asap for my IDX feeds.
Thanks for any thoughts/feedback-
Where does this stand? I’d like to have this as an RSS soon since I’m building out my micro-site landing pages for neighborhoods, projects, and demographic types.
We will be adding this in the future however it hasn’t made it to our development schedule yet. So I can’t give you an ETA yet.
Justin
Is there a way to display the rss feed within the html code of our websites?
Is there a way to display the map search without using an iframe?
Will there be a Market Trends rss feed that shows the average sold price, change in price up or down, price per square foot and days on market for a zip code, city or community that could update dynamically and be a snippet like the chat or slide show plugin?