Submitting your RSS feed to directories

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Everyone always talks about the importance of one way links to your website. Having a decent number of links can help you in quite a few ways. Not only do they improve your site’s ability to rank better in the Search engines they also provide additional routes to your content.

One way to really bump up your blogs traffic is by submitting your feed to various directories that accept feeds. This can be a real time consuming task, but its really worth it for the additional exposure it can bring your blog. A lot of spammers utilize this directories for their SPLOGS so they will start to create links for your site automatically. While these are not great links, they are links and probably carry just as much weight in the engines as blog comments do. If you really want to push this tactic to the next level you may want to check out BlueHatSeo.com. Now Blue Hat’s tactics can be considered pushing the edge of SEO and even into the dark side, but after all you are just using the spammers to your advantage with these tactics. Of course there is some risk involved with pushing this practice beyond the limits of just submitting them to the RSS directories. You’ll hav eot weigh the risk reward factor here.

Its not really smart to start submitting your feeds to the various directories when the blog is brand new, because most of these directories require a human to approve your blog, but once you have a decent amount of posts then you have a much better chance of getting your blog listed. I’ve also found that blogs that expose a higher amount of posts in the RSS feed have a better chance of getting approved. I don’t really know if there is any hard correlation between the two, it just seems that blogs with at least 25 posts in the feed get approved faster. I would suppose this is because the RSS site needs to make money to stay open and the more content it has the better.

There are a couple of methods you can use to cut down on the time it requires to submit your blog to all these engines. One method I use is a FireFox extension named Submit Em Now. This extension works really well and can save a lot of time. But there are some issues to watch out for. The first is this extension is not always up to date with directories  and you will find some that are either no longer accepting new submissions or do not work at all. You will need to register for most of the sites listed in the plugin and some even require a back link to their site which will add additional time to the time to takes to complete this task the first time. Even with these issues you can submit your RSS feeds to quite a few sites in record time.

There are quite a few other RSS submission sites that do not require a login or a backlink to submit your feed. This is really a great way to go as its a lot easier and accomplishes the same result. Traffic-Searcher.com has a great list of 30 RSS submission sites that allow you to submit without a login or back link.

While the benefit of submitting your feed to these directories will not be apparent at first they will help your blog’s growth and traffic long term.

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Comments

Great tips. This just proves that no matter how many tips you read over the net, there are bound to be new ones you have not heard. :-)

I had an old blog that I promoted pretty heavily back in the day that eventually got overridden with spam comments/trackbacks, pretty much anything they could do to get a link on my site they did.

So far I’ve been avoiding mass submission stuff to blog directories and rss directories.

Do you know if there’s any correlation to submitting to RSS feeds and Spam, or is it a pretty safe bet?

Thanks!

Tim, I’m pretty sure anything you do to promote a blog is going to attract the spammers. I get hit constantly, but Akismet pretty much takes care of them. There are quite a few comment spam plugins around now, but I’ve only used Akismet so I can’t vouch for any of the other’s effectiveness.

I have not tried but I’m pretty sure you could utilize several different spam plugins to help with the comment spam problem.

I still approve every comment on my blogs even with the spam filter installed. It takes a little time and there are people who think comment approval inhibits discussions, but I would rather take the time to ensure that my readers are not subjected to non-relevant comments.

Yes Akismet is awesome for sure, my other blog still runs and it easily catches a dozen false comments everyday (and I haven’t even updated it in a year haha)

The only MAJOR problem I ever had was with trackbacks, since there was no filter I could find for them. Luckily though, with this new Pingback system that seems to be very popular, I don’t think I have to worry about that kind of spam as much…

Or maybe I do :P

I guess I’ll see haha, thanks for the reply! I may look into RSS submissions soon :)

I’m developing a semi-automated tool to promote and submit your RSS Feeds to various one-click-submit RSS Directories, check out FeedStub.

@TypeLife, I actually saw your post on this last night. I started to update this post, but figured I would try it out and make another post about it later.

Bruce

Great advice. I’m not too keen on using auto-submitters, but eh…

good tips for getting found on the web.

[…] a blog. Another method that is effective in building of subscriber counts is to submit your feed to RSS directories people will locate your feed and some will subscribe. This practice also has the added benefit of […]

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