RSStatic - Optimizing RSS Aggregation

[jScott_Harris]

Hello old friends. The omnipotent being has returned (I notice my status has been bumped down BTW, thanks Raf). I've been away from WPW for a while, but I thought I would come back and let you guys know of a project we at http://www.cadwebsitedesign.com have just started developing and have released to the public free.

RSStatic
RSS has become an Internet phenomenon. It's ability to both distribute news and information while allowing website owners to actually publish fresh content on their site has cemented it's appeal.

Typical web based RSS aggregators simply allow you to publish a headline and link from your chosen feed. This provides you with fresh content on your site and gives visitors a potential reason to return. This offers very little value to search engine optimization efforts. RSStatic goes one step beyond that.

We developed RSStatic to take information from the feeds you choose and generate static html pages for each item in the feed. This quickly turns a 10 page website into a much larger, more robust site complete with relevant content that continually grows.

For more information check out http://www.rsstatic.com

You can also check out more features:
http://www.rsstatic.com/features.php

Sorry guys if this sounds a bit too informational and self promoting, but this is something I was to proud to have worked on and I'm excited to see where it goes. Hopefully people will contribute code and a community will develop around this and with each release we can offer more and more features.

Feel free to let me know what you think: scott@cadwebsitedesign.com

[KimberlyBlogger]

Sounds like a good product but I have one question...

... will the pages get red-flagged by Google for duplicate content?

If the page is only showing content from another site's RSS feed I would think that it might trigger the duplicate content filter.

Thanks

[jScott_Harris]

Well, lets take the entire iEntry network as an example. WPW itself takes rss feeds and repulishes them as individual post(ex: http://www.webproworld.com/viewforum.php?f=53 ). Even post submitted here or "duplicated" on other iEntry sites. More still, articles written and submitted to WebProNews are distributed to other sites in the iEntry network. And these are entire articles that are being republished. The Associated Press does this on an even grander scale. The guy that kept a collection of GoogleGuy post from WebMasterWorld made a living off of republishing content, as does services like Moreover and PRweb. Google doesn't penalize for the redistribution of content per se, it penalizes the redistribution of whole pages.

If filters caught minute amounts of dulicate content, you would never be able to quote another article in any of your writings and it would be unbenefitial to allow others to republish the articles you have written for your site. Which would mean the eventual downfall of RSS altogether. Even adding headlines from RSS feeds would get flagged as duplicate.

You can see we've been running this script for about 2months and Google has indexed just about all of the articles:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...om&btnG=Search

[paulhiles]

Hi there Scott!
Welcome back! Looks like an excellent product and something that I can use on a current client's project. They're a charity looking to integrate a blog site into their new website as well as catching other feeds from similar organisations.

Nice one! I'll give you more feedback as I go through it, but the demo looks cool on the website.

One pointer though.. on the site, the folder (Jan5) has a lot of missing navigation links... thought you should know!

Paul

[jScott_Harris]

paulhiles thanks for catching that...we just launched the site this morning and we're so close to it, we miss little things like that! It's fixed now btw

[KimberlyBlogger]

Thanks for the explanation Scott.

I can't wait to give this a try. It looks SWEET!

[mikmik]

That looks incredible! Thanks, I am going to try it.