Publish Your Full RSS Feed and Build Links at the Same Time

Many bloggers have been touting the benefits of publishing your full blog or site’s full RSS feed. In fact, they have been talking about it for a long time. But did you know that most likely even if you are publishing your full RSS feed you are not taking advantages of its link building benefits? Here is why you should publish your full RSS feed.

When you post items on your blog or your site, and your blog has an RSS feed, your post(s) can appear on many other sites. In fact, on this blog, I encourage others to use my blog’s RSS feed and re-use it as you see fit. In fact, there are lots of other sites that use my feed as their site’s content. Not only do I encourage it, it actually helps me out in the long run–here’s why:

If another site uses my site’s RSS feed as their content, it is their responsibility to make sure that the pages are not seen as duplicate pages. Since my blog gets spidered first by the search engines, I’m the original–and others are duplicates. Furthermore, as I link to other pages on my site in posts, those links will appear in my RSS feed. And whenever my RSS feed is used as content on another domain (web site), there is a good chance that the link might count as a backlink to my site.

So, as you continue to post on your blog or site, don’t forget to link liberally to other pages on your site–those links will potentially count as backlinks to your site, not only as internal links but external links to your site’s pages. Sure, someone reading your blog or web site may read the post and stay on your site (which is a good thing), but what if they’re on another site that’s syndicated your RSS feed?

Before you post, you might want to create a list of important pages on your web site or perhaps your favorite blog posts. I keep a list of my “important” pages (pages that I might want to rank well in a search engine) for future use. And when I finish a blog post I quickly scan my list of “important” pages and add a few internal links. I also record the anchor text that I used to point to the page so I don’t use it again too often.

Initial Blog Syndication
Promoting your blog or web site’s RSS feed is important–it’s part of the link building process. First, you will most likely want to use a list like this and a list like this to make sure your RSS feed is promoted properly. There are also sites in your topic area that encourage RSS site syndication. For example, there are places like this that do a great job of syndicating content.

Once you get your RSS feed listed and syndicated, you will notice that other sites will tend to pick it up. This is a good thing. Really.

When your RSS feed gets noticed (or you use sites like this and this and this to syndicate your feed, you might notice that there are other networks and other sites like Plugim.com and Bumpzee.com what automatically will publish your RSS feed. Again, as your RSS feed appears on other sites, it will include links to pages on your site.

Here’s a Cool Trick
Want even a better trick? Rather than use “plugins” and scripts to automatically figure out related posts, do it manually. At the end of your blog post, include a few links to related posts. But, put those links in your post so they get into your site’s RSS feed. That’s much more powerful than using a “related posts” plugin. As an example of this, I’ve included “favorite posts” at the end of this blog post.

The bottom line this: if you publish your full RSS feed don’t forget about linking to your internal pages on your site using the appropriate anchor text–not only could those links be counted as internal links, those links could be counted as external links, as well.

Want to read some more of my favorite posts? Here are a few links below:

14 Ways to Disclose Sponsored Links – A funny satirical post about disclosing sponsored links.
Social Media Marketing is Popular But… – Why we are not seeing money being put into Social Media Marketing.
Social Bookmarking Sites List – My list of social bookmarking sites. Needs updating, but still useful.
Linking Campaigns – An older article about linking campaigns.
PPC Keyword Mistakes – I hope you’re not one of these people. If so, then you really really need my help.

Update: Links in this post have been removed, as they weren’t working at last check. November 16, 2014.