How to Combine Multiple RSS Feeds for your Website

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Monday, 18 April 2011 22:04

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Publicity is the lifeblood of your online business. When it comes to it you really need every little but of help you can get and this means using all the tools at your disposal. RSS is an old technology that started surfacing in numbers around 2005 and has since become one of those things you pay lip service to but do not really know whether you should use or not.

It would help if you knew your friends used RSS to find information across the web, or your family, but I am willing to bet they do not. RSS then is a little like the Unicorn – your online developer will tell you, you probably need it. Your business consultant (if you have one) will tell you you definitely need it but it’s likely they will not be able to explain in detail why you need to have one.

First the simple truth: you need to have an RSS feed on your website.

Now the complex truth. Latest Comscore research on the subject shows that less than 10% of all internet users ever bother to make use of an RSS feed to keep up with websites they follow, find information or keep up to date. That means that less than ten people in 100 who visit your site will even know what it is in order to follow it.

If you are thinking of throwing in the towel and not bothering with it I understand but it will be a terrible mistake to make, so don’t. The same research which tells us how little RSS is used also shows that those who do use RSS are amongst the web’s power users. Not only do they know the benefits of RSS (the moment you update content on your site they will know about it) but they are also quick to spread the good news and publicise it. That however is not the real reason you need to have an RSS feed.

The Benefits of Using an RSS Feed

An RSS feed basically takes the information you publish in different areas of your website and repurposes it as a single line atom or xml feed you can import in many other parts of the web. For instance it can be placed on Facebook Page profiles (provided you have a Facebook FBML page which can parse the RSS Feed), it can be placed on social media profiles across the web, seamlessly publicizing your website content and it can be used as a handy promotional tool whenever you need to promote your site’s content in a Reader.

As a matter of fact an ESS feed has so many applications that when it comes to SEO and your website it is one tool which absolutely needs to be there even if, in the beginning, you have no idea how to use it properly.

Those who have an RSS feed (like HelpMySEO) have different dilemmas to deal with. My site has several RSS feeds, for instance. Great for helping visitors keep up with specific sections like SEO Tips, my Blog, Social Media News or Google News but totally useless if you want to keep track of the site as a whole (because you will need to subscribe to four feeds just for HelpMYSEO and positively short—sighted when it comes to publicising the site’s content elsewhere (for instance I maintain a presence on Facebook where the feed is published and it appears at MySpace and a few dozen places on the web) because if you want to change anything at all you are stuck.

You could for instance want to change:

• Your website’s programming
• Your RSS Feed engine
• Your website’s URLs
• All of the above

If you have been using your website’s RSS as the feed to post outside your site now you are in trouble. If you are diligent, of course, you will have kept track of every place where you posted your feed on the web but I know from my own example that this works more in theory than in practice. There have been many a times when I have opportunistically found a place where I could publicise my website’s RSS feed and on those occasions I have been too busy to make a note.

This is one reason why I use Feedburner – a company acquired by Google, Feedburner basically takes the RSS feeds produced by HelpMySEO and turns them into a Feedburner feed which I then use to publicise my website’s content across the web.

There are dozens, probably hundreds of online services which do the same thing. I prefer Google because it is a big enough company to not go away and leave me stranded and because Feedburner is closely integrated into Google’s online marketing strategy so I know that it can only evolve and get better, not worse.

Plus the service allows me to offer the ability for those who visit my website to subscribe via email or RSS, depending on which they find easier and this is a flexibility not many companies offer. Add it to Google’s usual bevy of reporting tools and optimization techniques and in my book it is a winner.

Using  Feedburner (or any similar service of your choice) to produce an RSS feed certainly solves some headaches. I could, for example do any of the activities mentioned before, or all of them. I could nuke my site, burn it down and set it up again from scratch (which actually happened to me. Or as near as, this month) and all I have to do is produce a new RSS feed, go to Feedburner, input it and presto. No one would even be the wiser, as the Feedburner feed will be unchanged (from the perspective of the outsider).

Feedburner, however, robust and user-friendly as it may be does come with some limitations. It doesn’t for example, allow you to input more than one Feed into its Feedstream. In my case this would be disastrous. Offering four Feedburner feeds makes no sense at all and managing them all, although decidedly easier than using my own website’s is still a major headache.

The solution to this, of course, is to find a way to combine the feeds and still use Feedburner. I have done just that and it’s a lifesaver so here is how you could do it.

How to Combine More than One Feed on Feedburner

Remember that Feedburner has the limitation that it only allows you to create a single Feedburner RSS feed from a single RSS Feed from your own website. So there is no way you can combine more than one on Feedburner.

There is more than one way to skin a cat however and there are ways you can get round this. Here’s what to do:

First, go to Yahoo! Pipes (or any feed aggregator you feel comfortable using). Again, I chose Yahoo! Pipes because, like Google they are big enough to be around for a while. If you have not got a Yahoo! account now’s the time to create one.

Yahoo! Pipes is a powerful programming interface which allows you to create programming through drag and drop modules. Once you’ve created an account you start by dragging the ‘Fetch Feed’ module from the left hand side onto the canvas area.

Click on the + side to add all the feeds you want. You could, for instance, combine a feed from Flickr, deli.cio.us bookmarks and an external blog not even linked to your site. Here’s what my fetch module looks like with the four feeds I input from HelpMySEO.

For me this was the overriding reason to get all four into one and I quite there. You can, if you want, extend the fun by dragging and dropping the filter module onto the canvas and filtering your output any way you like.

The ‘magic’ of Yahoo! Pipes is that you can link up the modules simply by clicking on the dot at the bottom of one module and dragging and connecting it to the top of the next module in order to activate things in the sequence you want. In my case I went straight from the RSS Feeds aggregator to the Output module.

You can preview your work by clicking on individual modules. The results appear in the Debugger box at the bottom of Yahoo! Pipes. By now you will be feeling like some whizzo programmer ready to create some fancy stuff so remember that the purpose of this is to help you create an amalgamated superfeed you can use for SEO purposes.

Having created my feed, I ran the Pipe to see what it looked like. You can see the results below:

Each Pipe also has a Permalink you can use as an additional means of online publicity (you never know when it may come in handy to post somewhere).

The final step was to take the RSS feed of the Pipe and input it in the RSS Source feed of Feedburner and presto! My little problem was solved. I now have a single feed for all the different parts of my website and, should I ever need to change anything on my site again I only ever need to run a single update in Feedburner.

Easy, right?

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