Many of you probably already know this, but: I've been hearing that adding RSS to your website will help boost your ranking, because it's "fresh" content. Inman has an RSS feed to their news for both consumers and agent/brokers. You can cut and paste the code to your site.

Lots of agent website packages already include this, but if you're building your own site, you might want to include it.
http://www.inman.com - go to the link for "Free Website Content" on the left.

There are several sites where you can search available feeds, anyone have a good one they use?

SueC

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Sue Caskey, Esq.,Realtor(R)
http://www.suecaskey.com
Keller Williams has Millionaire Agent Training PLUS profit sharing!
http://www.realestatecareerprofits.com

My wife uses RealEstateABC.com's newsletter for $99 per year. Here's info on it: http://www.realestateabc.com/propages/newsletter/

I use Realtytimes. Here's info on it: https://realtytimes.com/am/ampack-order.htm

The latter is more expensive, but I got a deal on it since I use several of their other products. I like their articles and customization features.

One of their nice offerings is the Marketing Conditions Reporting. Your regular reviews of local market conditions are syndicated and published in over a hundred major sites.

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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate
Rancho Palos Verdes Home Values

[This message has been edited by Ruperto (edited 09-12-2004).]

I have seen on several seo forums that google is starting to crack down on RSS feeds because of the so called spam content you recieve from them..I am no expert but if what others are saying on different seo forums is true then it may not be wise.



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The Best Real Estate Agents in Las Vegas and Atlanta in the Las Vegas Real Estate Market Atlanta Real Estate Market offering Las Vegas Homes for sale and Atlanta Homes

RSS used to be all the rage but I stay away these days

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Rich
VTWS Real Estate websites are among the top lead
generating Real Estate Websites in markets across the United States for Realtors and Companies alike.
Real Estate Search Engine Optimization

I posted to a couple of the other forums before I checked this one. Have you dealt with Websitebiztips before or heard of anyone that has? How can you tell if they are using an RSS feed?

We provide a weblog/RSS feed on realtybaron.com and it provides some nice traffic for us: HOT PROPERTY Real Estate Blog . Ours is slightly unique in that it's collaborative...a 'strength in numbers' approach. I recommend using a weblog if you can keep up on it. There's nothing sadder that running across a blog whose last post was a year ago.

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Marc
Top REALTORS® , home values , and real estate news & advice

[This message has been edited by realtybaron (edited 09-30-2004).]

It's not RSS feeds that Google is cracking down on. It is duplicate content, by collecting information from a specifc RSS feed there is probably hundreds of other sites who are doing the same exact thing.

What you could do to avoide being punished by Google for duplicate content is not let googlebot spider the pages which you are importing from the feed.

You could simply have it there just so that your visitors have something to read.

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Real Estate Web Design

The best practice with RSS is to use only your own content of listings, rentals and company news. Repurposing other people's news items is what can get you in trouble with Google.

http://www.myrealtyfeed.com - RSS for real estate professionals

If you search for google site maps you should fine a TON of info on the new google sitemaps feature that uses XML and RSS to alert Google when you update your site. Google is not cracking down on RSS but as mentioned before, they do have a duplicate content filter. If enough of your page or site looks like someone else's you will most likely be punished. However, RSS as a tool is safe.

Are RSS feeds getting you guys that much traffic? Please let me know, am interested. Have heard different stories.

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www.RegistryLine.com

I had the same question, but I see no one responded.

There are two aspects to the RSS feed, source and recipient. A recipient site will only benefit through relevant content but the benefit will be offset by the linkout which may distract and/or funnel away your viewer. The source side however has the benefit of inbound links from the recipients, and subsequent control over material presentation. The downside is maintaining fresh content.

The weblog can be a useful tool, particularly if you provide its content as an RSS feed for recipients. The balance is links that can be maintained whilst packaging content to attract recipient feeds.

RSS Feeds can be considered fresh content but for it to truely work, posting in Forums on a daily or weekly basis and having your signature link to your site shows activity as well. Also having a blog and posting in your blog on a weekly basis shows the search engines that your website is active and not static.

RSS feeds can be a double-edged sword. Someone with an aggregator or online reader will add your feed, view it from their software, and never visit your site. I don't see any jumps in traffic when adding a feed myself.

source is the winner, not the recipient.

Fresh content is definitely a plus for search engine rankings. Fresh content will be crawled more often.

A site I manage offers free rss/xml news feed and also an easy to implement javascript feed.

Real Estate News Feed

Hi altarealtor,
I have heard the same thing. One also needs to keep in mind that there are actual people looking at the site and not just SEs. One problem with RSS is that it can be used to provide content unrelated or telling nothing about the Realtor on her own website.

-Peter

Reasonably sure that using the javascript feed will not help with the search engines, as the text itself doesn't appear on the site. You need to use .php and embed the text on your page.

One place that state this is:

http://whitehatcrew.com/seo/rss-for-seo.php

That's true Peter, but the feed shouldn't have any more wieght than a link to any other associated site, in a relevance sense.

Maybe what should be set up is a feed that is parsed by the server script to personalize some of it's content based on the referring server.