As we gear up for this week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, we thought it timely to discuss the many ways in which feeds and the wonderful world of search engine optimization (SEO) intersect.
Increasingly, doing a search at a search engine will result in links to your feed as well as your site. This is a result of search engines’ increased use of feeds to help discover and index web sites, and is seen by many as an advantage in that it gives searchers multiple opportunities to find your content. Of course, some site owners want to control how (and when) their feeds show up in search results, as well as influence how the search engines interpret the information they find in the feeds. In order to better understand the issues, we keep in touch with representatives from the major search engines, and we also talk regularly with a number of leading SEO consultants. While a full SEO tutorial is outside the scope of this post, we wanted to at least outline the ways in which you can use FeedBurner to control and optimize your feed’s interaction with search engines.
Redirecting your feed to FeedBurner
In order to take full advantage of FeedBurner’s feed statistics, publishers often redirect requests for their feed to the FeedBurner version of their feed. In some cases, this is accomplished via a setting (TypePad) or a plugin (WordPress, Drupal, others). In other cases, you need to do a little server configuration. Server-based redirects are a powerful tool in a publisher’s toolbox, but publishers should take care to redirect properly. There are two general redirect methods – a “302” (aka “temporary”) redirect and a “301” (aka “permanent”) redirect. The recommended approach is a 302 – that means that your URL remains the authoritative location for the feed. Should you ever decide to move your feed off of FeedBurner, that means that aggregators and search engines will continue to check your URL rather than go directly to FeedBurner.
Autodiscovery
Search engines are smart, but unless you tell them where your feed lives, they’ll have a hard time finding it and adding it to their index. The easiest way to ensure that the search engines find and index your feed is to ensure that your auto-discovery (link) code properly points to your feed. With that pointer in place, whenever a search engine visits your site, it can see that there’s a feed associated with the site and (if appropriate) add the feed to its crawler. Anecdotally, many publishers have reported that this has helped increase the speed with which the search engines index their content. (Obligatory disclaimer: the search engines are always changing how they index content, so this could easily change as they refine how and when they index feeds.) For a backgrounder on auto-discovery, see this Publishter Tips post from last Fall.
My Brand
Publishers who use FeedBurner to manage their feeds receive a feed URL that includes the “feeds.feedburner.com" domain and the majority of publishers stick with this default. You can just as easily choose to not use the default domain if that's your preference. Our MyBrand service (one of our few paid services) allows you to map a subdomain so that your feed URL becomes “feeds.yourdomain.com” instead of “feeds.feedburner.com”. Either option gives you plenty of opportunity to rank well in search results, but publishers looking to have maximum consistency between their feed and site (not to mention publishers who are looking for maximum portability of feed URLs) might consider using MyBrand.
Clickthrough tracking
For years, FeedBurner publishers have had the option of tracking clicks from subscribers in aggregators back to the publisher’s site – this helps publishers better understand how engaged their audience is. The ability to track clicks can be turned on or off from the StandardStats section of the "Analyze" tab.
What fewer publishers know is that they can control which kind of clickthroughs FeedBurner implements on their behalf, as part of our TotalStats offering (our other paid service). You can use either a 302 (aka “temporary”) redirect or a 301 (“permanent”) redirect. A 301 redirect is likely appropriate to eliminate any possibility of duplicating content in the search index, as it’s an instruction to the search engine that the only authoritative location for the item is on your site. Additional explanation about configuring 302/301 is available on our site.
NoIndex
Several months ago, we added an option to the “Publicize” tab called NoIndex. If you’d prefer that your feed not be indexed by the search engines or Yahoo! Pipes, you can activate this option with a click. Note, however, that “noindex” is not universally supported (currently, Yahoo! is alone among the major search engines in supporting this feature). Should additional search engines update their handling of the ‘noindex’ flag, we’ll let you know. Update: Noindex is supported by both Yahoo! and Google for their web search engines.
Pingshot
One element of leveraging the search engines is to ensure that your content is indexed as quickly as possible. PingShot is designed to do exactly that: select the ping servers you wish to notify, and we will send a ping their way as soon as you have new content. (One advantage of this approach: many search engines watch their companion ping servers, so pinging one server can result in multiple places updating your content.)
Feed/SEO Appetizer
This is just a taste of what could easily become a very detailed feed/SEO discussion. There are obviously other aspects of feed/SEO that we haven’t addressed. Feel free to leave your questions in the comments or drop us a line and we’ll provide additional information as we can. See you at SES and I hope you'll join me for my sessions on Podcast & Audio Search Optimization and SEO Through Blogs & Feeds.
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