Feeds and SEO

Long time SimpleFeed customers know we view SEO as a secondary benefit of feeds. But that may be changing. The big news in RSS last week was this blog post from Google announcing they use RSS for page discovery and rank.

It has long been understood that feeds seem to help place your pages higher in organic search results. Search spiders better understand XML based feeds than HTML or Flash based pages. Further feeds make syndication as easy as cutting and pasting a URL. Besides a one-to-many distribution point for your content typically at the point of purchase, these syndication points represent “high quality inbound links” that Google weights heavily in Page Rank.

Really these are benefits enough, but add to it a new way to get your content into Google and properly structured RSS Feeds (pinging, yes; robots.txt, no) become a must in 2010.

While we are on the topic, here is our all time favorite example.

Kudos to SDT Ltd for their syndication hat trick of SimpleFeed customers.