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"RSS Gone Wild" is a SEO side effect. Sorry!

Posted by John W. Furst on
RSS hiccups happen

I implemented a couple of SEO related (search engine optimization) changes on this blog. But I did not stop there. I introduced some new features for my readers as well.

As a result and the side-effect of it, the 10 or 15 latest blog posts have been re-published on the RSS feed with ever slightly changing URLs. I had the RSS feed turned off today to minimize the effect this had on Feedburner, and your RSS blog subscriptions.

I hope you can forgive me that faux pax. I wrote about those side-effects in the original article where I go in detail over the background for the SEO changes.


The main SEO changes revisited


  • remove the date from the URL

  • keep the numeric index for the post, but move it up one virtual directory

  • remove punctuation characters like [.,;!]

  • finally, keep all URLs lower-case

  • Use the <link rel="canonical" … > entity to specify 1 preferred URL and solve the duplicate content issue this way.

  • introduce a new short version of the URLs

  • Of course last but not least, make sure all already published URLs (on the blog and out there on the Internet) remain valid

That's it in a nutshell.

I also have described the side effect of social media widget bankruptcy. No, it's not that serious. All that happened is the widgets and older posts show 0 (zero) submissions, because they don't know the new URL unless someone submits the post, again.


Social Media Related Changes



Here's the short list of changes you might have noticed already.
  • Yeah! The new “Tweet It Button” right in the upper left corner of every blog post. One click tweet. It's really that simple. Check it out.

  • I also put a Retweet This text link next t the ShareThis widget in the article footer. :-)

  • I am not displaying the Digg, and Reddit widgets for older posts. You guessed right, because they show “0” from the social media bankruptcy.

  • For Comments: Now you can subscribe to the comments for a particular post blog post via a filtered RSS feed.

    Blog comments available as RSS feed as an alternative to email subscription

All that is left to do is finally getting a “smarter domain name” for the blog.

What do you think?

Yours
John W. Furst

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John W. Furst on :

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I am an advocate of "testing," therefore, I leave this comment to check what the RSS Feed for the comments of this post looks like.

Seems to work flawlessly.

What do you think?

--John

Susan on :

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Funny term social media widget bankruptcy

Where can I get the Tweet It button?

I like it a lot.

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