RSS over Search Engines?
1 Jun 2006 by Mother Superior
Following on from yesterday’s post about ‘ransomware’, I’ve noticed that the news sites are now featuring the same story the MEN broke yesterday. However, before I found it through the search engines my RSS feeds delivered the story on BBC News, The Register and The Times Online.
So as RSS becomes more widespread, what does this mean for search engines? If you use Google News or Yahoo News this morning, the story is picked up from all the sources above and more, but through a general web search none of the above appear in the top ten pages of results.
Is this an indication of the ‘invisible rules’ of search engine optimisation? Or is it a deliberate attempt by the search giants to delineate information into sections. Either way, my prefered way to receive news is through RSS, so what will happen to the engines if this becomes the mainstream method of receiving news and subsequently other types of information?
Related posts:
Interesting stuff JB. I think it shouldn’t be a problem for the engines – this may be dumbing the issue down a bit, but: the concept of subscriptions to magazines hasn’t killed off newsagents. Of course the engines have a wider remit anyway.
In my view I think they are quite different things a search engine and an RSS feed, I subscribe to a feed that will provide me information that usually has a specific theme, e.g a news feed or someones blog or a podcast, where as I can’t really subscribe to an RSS feed that will give me the results of my next search.
Not sure that just having a RSS feed available will increase your ‘search engine optimisation’ but if you have one then you will get more visitors to your page and if your feed is incorparated into a site as on ukwebhelp.com then you get a few inbound links to your site that should increase your search engine ranking. If google gather all the news from other news sites and give you it all in their feed then they’re going to get your visit and not the bbc.