Why RSS Is Bad

When trying to fill up content for a whore site, many would be Google Whores take the easy way out by using RSS. They would pull in a bunch of feeds from a number of sites and create a new site with nothing but RSS feeds. There are even qet rich quick schemes that will sell you an entire system based around RSS feeds. You enter different categories, like technology or automobile, and it’s suppose to pull in a bunch of feeds based on your search parameters and create a site for you. Now you just add in the Google ads and watch the money roll in! At least that’s what these companies will tell you. After all, “If you build it, they will come.” Well, we all know from the So You Want To Be a Google Whore post that if you build it, they won’t come. This is not to say that you shouldn’t use RSS feeds to add to your site content. It just means that RSS shouldn’t be your site content.

The reasons we post our own news instead of relying on RSS feeds is because of three reasons. The first is, many of the sites we post news for don’t have RSS feeds. The second reason is I have to keep my news editor busy. If my news came from RSS, she would be out of a job and out on the streets (OK, maybe that’s not true). The last reason is the most important, Google (and other search engines) indexes the news we post. For example, Digital Grabber made a news post about a review done by Motherboards.org on an XFX 7800GS video card. A search on Google for the term “XFX 7800GS” shows Digital Grabber’s news post at the number 1 spot. Motherboard.org is no where to be seen. So check it out, I didn’t produce the review, my news editor just wrote about it in the site news and I get search engine traffic because of it. This would not happen had I used the Motherboards.org RSS feed.

Producing unique articles and reviews for a site takes time, but producing news is relatively easy because it’s sent to us from other sites asking for a news plug. The reason we plug these sites is not just because they post our news, but because the news posts we do gets picked up and indexed by Google. Digital Grabber has produced 19 articles/reviews since it started. However, it has pumped out over 160 news stories and continues to add 10 to 20 new news posts per day. We get more traffic from Google indexing our news stories than our articles because there is just so much more news pages than article pages. If all our news came from RSS feeds, our Google traffic would go down considerably. So think about that the next time you consider taking the easy out by building a site with RSS feeds.

The question you maybe asking now is, why is Google indexing my news? That question will be answered in a future blog post.