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.

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.