Re: feed sites
I agree with Bjorn. I played with an RSS fed blog last year and gave up. There just isn’t any point to it IMHO. I’ve attached a graphic showing how little traffic I got from search engines over nearly a year. Sure, I didn’t put up all that many posts, but the swings in traffic showed me the exercise was a bit pointless. Organic traffic should grow steadily not swing all over the place.
What Bec has going is apparently organic traffic on terms that are in her domain name. That’s not terribly hard to do - you don’t even need a site with content on it to accomplish that… Case and point I purchased the domain JaysonPark.com. JaysonPark.com doesn’t actually have any content on it. I just 301’d it to the page on my site that’s about Jason Park, and voila when you google Jayson Park you see JaysonPark.com as the display URL but the description is pulled off the text that’s on the page on rawtop.com. In other words, I get the number one slot for the search term, users think they’re going to JaysonPark.com, but they actually wind up at rawtop.com - and Google apparently likes it and I’m guessing owning JaysonPark.com strengthens my position on the search term Jayson Park. Now to accomplish that I did have to link to JaysonPark.com with the link text Jayson Park a few times, but that’s not nothing compared to managing a RSS fed blog, and I’m guessing because it’s redirected to a page with original content it will do better than it would as a splog.
That said, RSS feeds are useful - for automated tweets, for e-mails, and for extra content in a separate section of your site - just to keep people on your site and engaged. But you do it for the users, not for the search engines, and I never see the RSS portion as the primary purpose of the site. For example, I have a RSS-fed ‘new porn releases’ section on my discussion forum. It’s there just to keep the visitors amused while they’re waiting for something to happen on the site.
