Displaying RSS Feeds On Your Site
10 January 2010 – 11:28 pmLesson Four (and final lesson I think)
Now here is the part I really love about RSS feeds. You can use them to display rotating or fresh content on your websites.
Why is this a good thing? Well, not only does it make a better experience your visitors, which should always be your number one consideration, it also puts fresh content on your pages which search engines love. Fresh content can mean better SERPs.
This can be content of entirely your own creation that you can cause to rotate and refresh as you want to. Or you can pick a keyword and go over to an RSS feed directory or the Google blogs search engine and display feeds created by others.
This is one way I have used RSS feeds on my websites.
I have picked a keyword, such as “baby crib bumpers”, (if that was the topic of a website) and put it in the blogs search engine at http://blogsearch.google.com/. It takes you to a page that gives you a sampling of recent blog posts on that particular keyword from many different blogs. In the left column you will see “Subscribe Atom | RSS.” I copy the link address for RSS it it will say something like: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=baby+crib+bumpers&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
Now I use a really nifty script called CaRP (Caching RSS Parser) to get the feed to display on my site. With CaRP there are a great many choices on how to display the items in the feed. One thing I do with blogs is to add a “no follow” to the links since sometimes something unsavory will turn up. There are also filters you can set up to try to prevent the unsavory from displaying. Some keywords are more prone to this problem than others. I always preview a blog search for the first forty or so items to see if it will be a persistent issue or not.
One great thing about CaRP is that when it displays RSS on your webpage it does so with a PHP script that alters/updates your HTML before the browser displays it. When you look at a webpage’s source (ctrl+U) you will see no sign of CaRP, but you will see lovely content in the form of links, titles and descriptions. This is a vast improvement over displaying a RSS feed in a javascript. With a javascript the search engine has nothing fresh to crawl.
Anyway, if you are willing to give it a try here is the link to CaRP, and this is an affiliate link, by the way.
One small warning: I personally do not consider CaRP to be a newbie script to work with. While I got it to work initially very quickly in its basic form, I have spent many hours ironing out little problems that have cropped up trying to get my feeds to display just so. One thing that has come up with CaRP is that I have decided to build all my webpages in PHP.
