RSS technology, being an undeniably effective tool for website promotion, should still be evaluated objectively. A detailed study allows you to draw conclusions about both the undoubted advantages and disadvantages of the technology.
Advantages of RSS feed
For the user:
- Economy
Interesting information is collected in one feed, familiarization with which takes less time and traffic than manual checking (when each site is opened, loaded, and then examined for updates).
- No fees
Sources value their interested readers.
- Quick notification
As soon as a favorite source is updated, subscribers are instantly notified.
- No ads
Annoying banner ads are annoying and distracting. With an RSS feed, this problem is eliminated. For a website, the advantages are an increase in the number of links leading to the resource (or link mass), the growth of its popularity, retention of regular users and attracting new audiences. The decision to place RSS on the site is correct, you just need to take some measures to protect yourself from the disadvantages of integrating the technology into the web resource.
Disadvantages of RSS
The minuses of the technology threaten only the owners of sites. For users, it remains attractive and useful. The only problem is that a person does not always have time to fully familiarize even with the news feed, because he subscribed to many resources.
For sites, everything is much more serious:
- Search filters
There is a risk that the RSS feed will appear in the index before the original source. And this is associated with all the charms of non-uniqueness, duplication and uselessness. Robots will not be persuaded, so it is better not to create an unpleasant precedent and put in the feed only announcements, not articles in their entirety, with an appeal to read the full version on the site.
- Content theft
And it’s instantaneous. As soon as you place a new original material on your resource, as it immediately appears on another site. Even top resources are not bent on using someone else’s articles. And the probability that your resource, entering the battle for the title of primary source with a recognized leader of the information market, will win, record low, if not negligible. And you should not count on the integrity of thieves: you will not find a link to the original source there.
Here we can also say a few words about parsing, which is greatly facilitated by XML-format. This type of industrial espionage and outright theft leads to the same extremely negative consequences in the form of filters and sanctions for non-unique content.
- Falling attendance
Even if there is a link to your resource, it does not mean that visitors will crowd to the site. There is no need for this, because they have already familiarized themselves with the article where they saw it. As a result, fall and your advertising revenue.
We didn’t bring these disadvantages to make you give up RSS immediately and permanently. Fids are necessary for your subscribers, and therefore for you. But how can you set up an RSS feed on your site to minimize the risk of such problems? You need to add caution to your actions: publish announcements instead of full texts, stimulating the desire to go to the site and read the original, and don’t add the feed to the various RSS directories immediately.
