Having worked on DSG so much over the past 2 months and having talked with some really experienced internet marketers has really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff about internet marketing. One specific thing is the up and coming influence of RSS.
We’ve done some really cool things with RSS that are causing us to get indexed ridiculously fast by the search engines and that are bringing us some pretty good inbound links.
However, we still think there’s more to RSS than what’s currently happening. We think it’s going to start affecting search engine results based on how many people are subscribed to that sites rss feed. I mean, it makes sense doesn’t it. Both yahoo and msn have a pretty good idea of the number of people subscribed to certain rss feeds because of their my yahoo and my msn accounts. If more people are subscribed to a certain sites rss feed, it must mean that that site is pretty good shouldn’t it?
Soooooo, dan has spent the past few days writing scripts to automate this for us. We create yahoo and msn accounts manually (darn yahoo/msn security images…they’re too good for us to read with the computer) and then we give insert the username/password into the database. Dan’s script logs into yahoo/msn and subscribes the account to a number of our rss feeds that we give it. We then ping yahoo and msn saying that those sites were updated.
We’re hoping that since our RSS feeds are subscribed to by so many “people”, we’ll get better ranking in their serps.
Dan also wrote a script to login to those accounts periodically just so they stay active. (oh yeah, and also one to automate posting to a blogger account and a spaces.msn.com account…but those are for another discussion).