RSS and RDF| Sitemaps | XML

[iCraig]

What's the diddly o?

Everyone seems to be ranting about them recently, good for SEO, good for content distribution.

I get the deal on RSS feeds for news sites and blogs etc, but what are RSS sitemaps. How they improve SEO and how do you go about utilising them?

Please don't just slap an article link in my face, because more often that doesn't help me learn and I get bored reading them.

If someone can explain in simple terminology what all the fuss is about, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

 

[Augmented]

In principle they're no different to traditional HTML sitemaps - they provide immediate access to all content from one source point, irregardless of the depth of the content. Pages three clicks from the homepage are given just a good chance of being spidered regularly as pages one level deep.

XML sitemaps, at least in Google's implementation, are just a more specialised format. Along with being able to directly inform the spider of all your content, you can prioritise and highlight the most frequently updated and important parts of your site. You can tell it page A [a top-level page] gets updated daily but it's not really that essential to be spidered immediately, while page B [a deep link] gets updated weekly and is really important that the spider sees and indexes it straight away. Something which isn't possible to do with a traditional sitemap.

However, the XML sitemap is only a guide for the spiders, and there's no gurantee it will benefit a site any more than a regular HTML sitemap.

Incidentally, RSS/XML feeds aren't really that useful for SEO purposes unless the feed's getting syndicated on a large number of sites. They're more useful for generating natural inbound links and promoting return visits.