RSS Feed Directories

RSS feed directories are basically websites that function as an online catalog of RSS feeds from various blogs and sites around the web. You can submit your blog or site's RSS feeds to the directories, and it essentially republished all of your content on their site. And every time you publish new content to your blog or site, the RSS feed in the directory will automatically update, publishing your new content.

Until recently I had just submitted my websites' RSS feeds to one or two RSS feed directories. But recently I have been using SENuke, which has an RSS module that currently features 18 RSS directories. There are also other lists online like this one (it's a little outdated, but a lot of the directories still work). At first with SENuke I was only submitting the RSS feeds of the new Web 2.0 properties I created for promotion, but then I decided to submit the feeds from some of my main money sites. I also submitted them to some directories on the list above. The result? I got a pretty sharp increase in search engine traffic that brought my income up by about 50%. This lasted about a week, and then the effects went away. But when I posted new content to those money sites, some of the effect came back (but not all of it).

Basically the benefits of using the RSS directories are that these high authority websites publish your content along with backlinks to your website/blog. Those high authority backlinks improve your site's search engine rankings. That's why I got that huge sudden jump in search traffic, because by submitting my sites to 50 or so directories, I automatically got hundreds of backlinks to each of the sites. The question is why did the effects fade? It could be that Google first notice all my backlinks and gave me credit for them, but then figured out that they were all essentially the same and that I had just submitted my site to a lot of directories, and then reduced the amount of link juice I was entitled to. Or I guess it could be that when you first submit your feed, it is at the top of the list on the directory, but the longer you leave your content not updated, the further your feed slips down on the directory's list and gets less attention. I am inclined to think that's the case because when I updated my money site's content, some of the original effects were restored. Maybe the feed hits the front page whenever you update, then slowly drops down. Honestly I'm speculating, and if anyone knows the definite answer I'd love to know it.

In any case, the benefits of submitting your feeds are obvious and it's a very simple process, so if you haven't done it yet then you should. You can also submit feeds for your accounts on Ezinearticles, Hubpages, your social bookmarking accounts, etc.