If you want to keep your content fresh and topical, but haven’t got the time to write daily, then RSS Feeds can be a great second option. Why might you use them and why might they cause you problems?

Displaying RSS Feeds (Really Simple Syndication) on your website or blog allows you to take the content from another website or blog and display it on your own website. It gives you additional content that you might not otherwise have the time, and maybe not the skill, to put together. However, there are pros and cons.

The problems
I used RSS Feeds on a couple of financial sites a few years ago. My intention was that (as I will discuss in a moment) the feeds would keep the pages fresh and up to date. Good idea, however you are dependent on the quality of the RSS Feed, its speed and its bandwidth. Quite often I would be testing the site only to find the pages weren’t loading as the RSS Feed was struggling to provide data. And this was from a big, well known, provider. So you must choose a good source and keep testing it.

The other problem is that search engines are not stupid and see the duplicate content appearing on your website. Worse still, the RSS Feed will no doubt link to the providing site for full stories, showing exactly where the content is being taken from. So if you think that an RSS Feed will give you search engine benefits, think again.

The benefits
A well chosen RSS Feed can be interesting to your readers. But I repeat – it must be well chosen. A general news feed on a blog about a specific subject or niche is probably not going to see any particular benefits to its readers. What you are hoping to do is to provide some extra information to them whilst they are visiting, for example latest golf scores on a golfing blog.

However, unless you find a particularly good source that your readers can’t easily get at themselves, they are more likely to be going direct, unless you have a very loyal readership.

However, there are exceptions where feeds are very useful. As a reseller of hosting I can take my host’s RSS Feed and display a white label page of the latest status updates. As this does not link to the host’s website, my customers get easy access to the information without knowing the source.

How do you do it?
For many blogs there are simple plugins to use to add the feeds into your side bar. For websites you are likely to have to use PHP or ASP to break down the feed and format it to suit your page.

Either is easily done, with a little care!

With so many lazy ‘bloggers’ about happy to steal content from anyone’s website, what can you do to stop them in their tracks? Not much really, but there are a few possibilities to protect your work.
By Keith Lunt, ©howtostartmyblog.com

First we need to understand how someone might copy your blog’s content. It is actually very simple. You provide an RSS Feed of your latest posts and they subscribe to that. They then use a tool to turn these posts into posts on their own blog. Sadly, there are too many plugins available to do this task so it becomes very easy.

Stopping copying in its tracks
Because of this, the easiest way to stop someone from copying all of your posts in full is by just providing the summary, or the first so many words, in your RSS Feed. If the full post is not there, then they cannot steal it through the feed. Simple!

Why then don’t we all do this? Well readers wanting to access the information might not want to see only the summary and get fed up, eventually unsubscribing.

Making your posts less attractive to copying
If your can do something to your posts to make them less attractive to those wanting to copy them, then you should stop the copying before it happens. You could subscribe to a service such as Copyscape, but are you happy to pay for this service and do you really want that banner on your blogg and does detecting the problem prevent it?

However, there is an easy way around it. On some posts, it does not need to be every post, just include a simple copyright statement, such as:
By [my name], ©[mywebsite.com]

Quite simple and if anyone starts bulk copying your posts they are going to be displaying that copyright statement on their site. Not only showing they are copying your work, but also telling people where to go for the original work. You can take it a step further by making your name, the URL or the entire sentence a link back to your blog.

The side effect of this little trick
Displaying a copyright statement on your own posts does not exactly cause you a problem on your own website. However, if someone does miss the fact that a few of your posts link back to your website and start copying from you then they will actually be doing you a favour! They are spreading links back to your website across their website.

If they have a genuine readership then some of these people are going to be wandering over to your site when the see the links and search engines will see the links as one way, giving you the benefit. The search engines will also see that they are linking back to your website and Google in particular seems to take this as a sign of where the original content came from, preventing you from having a duplicate content problem. You actually therefore beat the person copying from your blog!

I was very unamused when this morning I discovered on my stats that someone had visited one of my blogs on the term “make money stealing content websites“.

Well I am sure that they were a “bounce”, or if not maybe I converted them to better ways. After all, there are details on my blogs as to how to revenge someone who is stealing content, but other than passing comments on how these people are using RSS Feeds, no more details.

Not that it really takes much imagination to work it out. And that is the problem – it is so easy to steal the content and to make money from it, the only problem is making sure that you are the number 1 blog when people are searching for various terms.

It is a very lazy way to work and I do wonder if we all kept out eyes open for stolen content and raised DMCA complaints every time (easy to do) whether the hosts would put paid to the blogs stealing content?

Also, if we dropped into our posts references back to our own blogs so that it was obvious that the posts were stolen, would that put the readers off the blogs and direct them back to the original sources? Time will tell.

There are a whole variety of sites that scrape content from blogs using the RSS feeds. Some are quite open about it and just display a teaser followed by a link back to the original website, whereas others pass off the work as their own whilst displaying the full posts.

Whilst I do not condone such copying, there is a way to make the copy work for you. We have all heard of the Google duplicate content filter, but it seems that these days, if the copying website attributes the work back to you (with a link) then Google accepts this and you get full credit.

So that is exactly what we have to do and in fact, we can turn a thief into a benefit. You might almost want to be encouraging them!

The first step is to download and install a related posts plugin. There are loads about and they can usually slot the list of related posts into the end of the post. This means that your readers see the list and might read on further, whilst at the same time anyone copying your posts also copies the list.

This gives us 2 advantages. First, anyone reading their website might see the list and jump over to your website. Secondly, they are giving you a number of deep links straight to your website! Both are excellent benefits.

But it depends on there being related posts, otherwise the idea fails. So it can also be worth while adding a couple of links to various pages from a lot of your posts, especially if you do detect someone copying your posts. Either just use the links to refer readers to other suitable pages, or even just link back to your home page.

Of course, all links do not need to be to posts. Why not to categories and tags? Spread the links out if you can! And if you own multiple websites, why not cross link them from within the posts? When the posts are stolen you are getting a whole array of free links!

Finding out that someone is copying your blog posts can be a terrible thing and can cost you a lot of website traffic. But, what simple actions do you need to take to get the copies deleted and your traffic back up again?
By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com

Recently I was notified that posts from one of my blogs were appearing on another blog, who was claiming them as original works. I had noticed that the traffic on that blog was dropping off rapidly over recent months and when I searched on sentences in my posts, the stolen content always appeared above my own. Google was favouring the reproduction over the original.

I reacted and thankfully most of the posts were removed. But a week later I had to do it all again as there were still some posts being displayed. In all, I spent almost a full day sorting the problem. By the end of it I had learned from my mistakes and knew how to do it better.

How is it done?
First of all it helps to understand how the content is robbed wholesale. In short, it’s the RSS feed. There are plugins available to do the job and I discovered which he was using, not that the information helped me. One answer is to just syndicate a summary by RSS, but is that as good for readers?

Don’t react too quickly.
If you discover this is happening to you, do not over react. Most bloggers stealing content are at it a few times a day, so show a little patience and follow these steps:

1) Add a new post to your blog – It seems daft when you know they will steal it, but that’s the point. Add to the post a copyright statement, your name and if you want your website address. Embed it deeply, say after the introduction paragraph. For example, By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com.

2) Watch the offending blog – At some point they will access your RSS feed and steal the new post. Once they do that they have a post on their website which clearly shows it is copyright of you.

3) Find out who their hosts are – Just do a whois search on their URL and this will lead you to their hosts.

4) Search for a DMCA template email – This is the official complaint form. It sounds difficult, but it isn’t. Most of the content is just legal wording and then you provide the links to the copied content and the original content, using the recent post as evidence that they are stealing from you.

Once the DMCA email is sent to the abuse department of the hosts they have just 24 hours to sort the problem. In my experience it took just 40 minutes for the final posts to be removed. Better still, it is putting the onus on them to find any other stolen content.

What I wouldn’t do.
What I would not do again is to approach the website owner directly. Straight away they are alerted and will drop your RSS feed, but they can leave the older content up and then how do you prove who has the original?

RSS feeds are great for getting more readers, but they can also be the source of the theft of your posts. What can you do to limit the problem and give yourself the best chance of a quick fix if it does happen?
By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com

Some bloggers are so lazy that they do not bother to write for themselves, but instead use plugins to gather content from RSS feeds on other websites. They do some work so that their blog ranks well and then effectively steal not just the content, but also traffic, from other blogs. How do you prevent this?

RSS Feed – Summary Or Full Text?
Just giving a summary in your RSS feed will almost certainly protect you from such theft, but your readers might also not find it as useful and might leave. So, it is not an option.

Copyright Your Blog
Just put somewhere on the header, footer or sidebar of your blog that the content is copyright of you. It won’t stop any theft, but it is a requirement of getting copied content removed.

Name Drop In Your Posts
If you write an introductory paragraph in your posts, then just include a simple copyright after it, for example By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com. If you don’t then just find somewhere else to include it within the content. Given that it will be appearing on their blog and they are claiming the posts as their work, this might be enough to put some fraudsters off copying your work.

Include Some Stock Photos
A bit of a nasty trick this one, but join a stock photo library and download some photographs or images that are suitable for including in your posts. It’s better if you can buy some that are exclusive to that library.

Then include these in your posts. If the post is copied they will copy the image. Then just email the library and tell them that you are aware that they are displaying unlicensed photos that have been copied from your site. It won’t protect your blog, but if you are having trouble getting content removed then there is someone else on your side.

Include A Related Posts Plugin In Your RSS Feed
You should be using a related posts plugin already in your blog, but is it active in your RSS feed? If not, it should be. That way anyone copying your posts also copies the related posts links and then gives you some links back to your website. Even if they “nofollow” the links, you will get some of their traffic visiting your website (and that’s how I first discovered the theft of my own posts!). And these extra links off their site might persuade them to copy from elsewhere.

If building your blog traffic is the key to the success of a blog, then the RSS feed is part of the system that will make it work. But why, and how?

As a blog owner, hopefully you know and understand exactly what a RSS feed is, but just in case you don’t, here goes.

Sharing With RSS
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds are an easy way of sharing content. The blog owner is in totally control of what is shared and it makes keeping up to date a really easy task.

Increase Return Visits
For the blog owner, it can increase traffic back to your website. Primarily it is increasing the repeat traffic to your blog, which is very important traffic. If a reader is willing to come back time and time again to see what interesting new content you have placed, they are valuable dedicated readers. Not only does this increase your traffic levels, but they are then also likely to start joining in by placing comments, book marking with sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon and sharing your ramblings with their friends directly and through sites such as Twitter.

Best of all, because they are long term readers not only do you get to interact through comments and replying to their comments, but they also have more trust in what you say and are more likely to respond to affiliate promotions.

Increase New Visitors
But RSS Feeds are not just about existing visitors. Some websites like to share the content of other websites and they do this by utilising the RSS feeds. By displaying your RSS Feed content on their website they are possibly showing it to new readers, who might become your visitors.

How Do You Install RSS?
So, how do you use them if they are so fantastic for generating traffic? Well any decent blog software will have an RSS feed built in, but there are also tools such as Feedburner that gives more options.

Then, make sure you have a big, obvious RSS Feed icon on every page. Make it obvious, somewhere that people will look to and always notice it. Also, add a page about using the feed – how to subscribe, what it does and so on. Invite your readers to subscribe and keep up to date.

You Choose Your Options
It is up to you how you run your feed. Options will permit you to have, for example, just the most recent 10, 20 or whatever number of posts you want to include. Some people like to just include a summary of the post, fearing that others will use the feed to steal content, whilst others like to share as much as possible to get the best advantages.

You can also use tools to exclude certain categories from your feeds. I like to drop the uncategorised posts from my feeds – I categorise every main post so anything filed in uncategorised is usually off topic and I don’t want to trouble regular feeders with them.

It is up to you how you use the RSS feed, just make sure that you do as they are invaluable in building your website traffic.

A couple of days back I successfully migrated one blog to feedburner. Yesterday, I tested with a second blog and then moved this blog.

It’s a shame that I didn’t test this blog when I moved it – it appears that the feed has been down over night. Sorry to anyone trying to access it!

I’m working on it now, but the Feedsmith plugin just does not seem to want to accept that I’ve given it an incorrect Feedburner URL and although I keep updating it, every time it still shows the old URL.

Should have it sorted soon. I hope (I’ve plenty of other tasks to be doing!).

UPDATE: The answer to fixing it is quite simple! You just write a new post and then it all picks up again. Posting the post to say the RSS was down fixed it. Who would have guessed that!

Over on one of my other blogs, I finally set-up Feedburner. It wasn’t too difficult, but it gave me a nice surprise today!

I set up the feed yesterday so I’ve been checking back every so often to this annoying message about taking the bubble wrap off. Basically, it takes Google 24 hours to compose the initial statistics and release them.

And when I viewed the stats I was surprised to see that there are several subscribers to the RSS feed, even though that blog hardly gets any traffic at all.

I’ve got another blog with tons more traffic, so tonight I’ll be setting up Feedburner on that and then watching on Friday to see what the stats say there.

It is interesting though to use. For those who don’t blog and don’t use Feedburner, it basically gives counts of how many subscribers you have, which pages they have accessed and a few other factors, such as the browsers they are using.

But the fact that people are subscribing to the feed and using it to read posts is really great. It make me feel that somewhere out there are people wanting to read my blogs!

There are other reasons for wanting to apply Feedburner. Basically, there’s a theory out there that traffic brings Search Engine Optimisation success. Maybe more about that over the next month.

For now though, I’m just watching Feedburner!