Those of you who are subsccribed via feed got this news on the 7th, but I thought it was big enough news to warrant a full post.
It seems that Google has jumped fully into the RSS pool after over a year of sticking its big toe in first. Google’s answer to subscribing to RSS feeds is called Google Reader, and was launched in Beta this past Friday evening.
Here’s a short quote from the first article I read about this on Friday, in the Search Engine Watch blog:
“Google Reader is “the most comprehensive feed finder available,” said Jason Shellen, the Google product manager who spearheaded the development of the program. Comprehensive, yes, but Reader also adheres to Google’s trademark simple, easy-to-use design philosophy. “We’re trying to find an easier find and subscribe model for feeds,” said Shellen.”
There’s a link to the full story below.
Google’s solution is going with a smooth, easy to use interface, that hopefully will help take the head-scratching out of using RSS by the time it reaches mass distribution and comes out of Beta testing. Great news for those os us already using RSS or an implementation of it, to draw traffic to our sites or organize information for wide distribution.
While this doesn’t seem to be the end-all, be-all answer for anyone who still doesn’t get what RSS is, what it does, and why it is important for business owners to have a handle on, it’s certainly a huge step in the right direction. Now, each of the three major search engines have a way for RSS beginners to access the Web in this way.
My blog feeds are showing up for many of the keywords I used when I was setting it up, and as I predicted this is one of many factors in getting your feed properly indexed for targeted traffic, even though the index in use appears to be fluctuating.
On Friday evening, the index in use for discovering feeds using Google Reader’s search function seemed to be the standard web search. But starting late Sunday, the search results looked a lot more like those you’d find in Google Blog search – which certainly makes more sense, but may exclude RSS feeds that aren’t attached to blogs.
I’ll keep an eye out on progress for this. In the meantime, it’s a good idea to get your site in position to take advantage if your site has feeds that are updated on any type of regular schedule.
Tags: free traffic :: website promotion :: Google Reader :: Google
Resources : Read the entire artilce in the Search Engine Watch Blog :: Check out the original post in the Google Blog :: Try the Google Reader yourself.
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