How to get your RSS feed listed in the Yahoo! search engine

(July 6 2004) Sometimes the Yahoo! search engine will add a link to a relevant RSS feed beside a regular search listing -- provided, of course -- that the site has its own RSS feed.

An RSS feed is a text file (XML) that can be used to list the latest news headlines from that site, together with relevant links and descriptions. There are newsreaders and software that can read these files and present the information in a readable way.

Yahoo! has been including links to RSS-feeds for some time. However, it has not been including links to all relevant RSS-feeds, even if the sites have one.

Now there is an easy way for you to get your RSS feed listed in Yahoo! - for free!

Loren at the Search Engine Journal has made the following discovery:

If you are a registered Yahoo! user, it is easy to add your RSS feed to your My Yahoo! page. This will make the Yahoo! search engine aware of the RSS feed and - presto - it will appear in a Yahoo! search.

• Go to your My Yahoo! home page (if you don't have one, you may register for free).
• Go to the end of that page, and click on the "Choose Content" button.
• On the new page, under "My Yahoo! Essentials", tick off "RSS Headlines (BETA), and click on the link.
• In the pop-up window that then appears, type or paste the address of the RSS feed. Click on the Search button.
• Click Add in the next window.

The headlines from the RSS feed now appears on your My Yahoo! page. Moreover, Yahoo! has become aware of the feed, and will include it in its search engine database.

It is a fair guess that Yahoo! will follow the links included in the RSS feed when spidering your site, which means that the search engine will find new pages more easily.

Yahoo's helpfile on their RSS directory has more on how often Yahoo! will revisit the RSS file, which formats are supported and so on.

For more information on the use of RSS feeds, see XML.com and Webreference.com. See also Syndic8.com, which has more detailed info on the Pandia RSS feed.

Pandia's RSS-feed -- which presents the headlines found in our Searchworld search engine news column -- can be found at www.pandia.com/sew/wp-rss2.php. The RSS feed can also be syndicated through NewsIsFree.

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