Welcome to the Joomla SEO Club and Book

On Monday we offered a free copy of our Joomla SEO eBook for the best answer to the following question:

"What's the easiest way to tell Google what's new on your Joomla! site?"

We really had some great answers, including;

• From Zorro: Have a working RSS feed on your site that can be autodiscovered. Click here to learn how to add an orange RSS icon to the address bar of your site.
  
• From Danilo Silva: Using Feedburner and pinging to notify blog services.
  
• From Zander: By submitting a xml sitemap to the Google Webmaster Tools. Joomap is considered to be best option.
  

However, the winner is Denis Ryabov who is responsible for developing the very useful new Ping Component for Joomla. Its an easy way to ping around 50 blog services to tell them that your blog has been updated. The lack of pinging has long been a weakness in using Joomla for blogging.

I was aiming to talk about his work in this blog post anyway so I'm delighted he's posted here - his component will make it into the next update of the book.

Why are RSS Feeds So Important for SEO?

There is of course a whole marketing aspect to RSS Feeds because they encourage people to visit your site daily, but there are crucial SEO uses for them.

but there are three reasons why RSS Feeds are better:

1. Google is now indexing blog feeds very, very quickly. I've seen blog posts from Alledia.com turn up in the search results inside of an hour. No need to wait for Google to reindex your site in 3/4 days.
   


2. There are no formatting problems across search engines. No messing around different sitemap formats to please Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Baidu and others.


3. The content is in order of relevance. We've talked before about using real sitemaps to get your Joomla content indexed quickly but still most sitemaps are often upside down with the most recent information at the bottom. Your RSS Feeds are small sitemaps for your latest news.

Comments (2)

...
written by Danilo Silva, September 19, 2007

I was close though

RSS feeds have been one of my biggest nightmares with Joomla. Run-Digital didn't work for me because the feeds published with it kept pointing to a restricted area of the website.

Now I use another component but haven't been able to publish full posts (intro + full content). Any ideas, tips or even paid assistance I would be glad to know.

Thanks for the great info!!

Indexing speed
written by Zorro, October 10, 2007

Google is now indexing blog feeds very, very quickly. I've seen blog posts from Alledia.com turn up in the search results inside of an hour.

Hi Steve,

just to back you up on this one: About 50 minutes ago I posted an article about the built-in SEO features in RC3. After publishing it, I pinged the blog aggregator services with the excellent new ping component that I mentioned here and use regularly.

Then, the phone rang, I had a short meeting, then went back to the computer to check up on Google blogsearch, and lo, there it was. They had indexed my article, and below it they said "44 minutes ago". Pretty damn quick I'd say.

Kind regards,
Zorro

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