FeedAgg Blog

I’ve tightened the feed acceptance polices lately having to do with duplicate and broken html items in your feeds.  If you are getting feeds rejected it’s time to make changes.

Tagging your feed is one of the most important things when submitting a feed. Because tags make up our navigation, tagging your feed correctly is vital to enable our visitors to find your feed.  The best performing feeds on FeedAgg are feeds that tag their feeds with detailed tags related to their feeds but also tags that cover the base or root topic of their feed.

For example, take a feed related to high performance sport cars like the Audi R8. Not only would you want to include tags related to the car like “audi r8″ and “audi sports car”, but also tags like auto and car. These more generic tags help in better categorizing your feed so it can find the best fit and widest audience.

Many people wonder what the best visited feeds have in common and it comes down to this: great content and plenty of it.

In general our best feeds have content that consists of multiple items(posts) in the feed.  This content is well written and is unique to that feed and it is all on topic to the tags and content.

What these feeds don’t have is:

• Repeating feed items at the end linking to the same sites that you linked to in 50 other feed submissions.
• A feed full of broken html and javascript
• 1 50 word feed post in the entire feed.
• Poor grammar.

In fact these problem feeds are turning into such large problems we are in the process of working to ban them all together.

Just a quick note about feeds that include duplicate items. If you submit a feed with many duplicate items they will be flagged for verification and deleted. You should not being submitting the same footer items for every feed you submit. If you have a valid reason for this and believe your feeds shouldn’t be flagged please email us, support at feedagg dot com so we can take a look. We get far too many submissions like this and nearly all of them are spam.

I’ve been working on some internal plumbing stuff on the site and wanted to highlight a few common mistakes I’m seeing when people submit and promote their feeds.

Broken Referral Links

I’ve been looking through our 404 logs and have noticed many people are linking to their feeds with incorrect addresses.  Some people have 100′s of broken links to their feeds! That’s a lot of wasted link juice. As the system works, you need to use the exact url that is shown when you visit your feed or what the system returns when you submit your feed. If you are going to take the time to submit your feed and promote it, why wouldn’t you verify the addresses you are promoting?

No Tags

There are still some people that are adding feeds without tags. While this doesn’t affect us(and is a positive for server resources), it surely affects those of you that are adding your feed for exposure. Tags are used for a few purposes:

1. Each tag gets you exposure on that tag page and forms the basis of our site’s categories.
2. Tags are a part of the equation that is used to form the related feeds links on our pages.
3. Tags are going to be used extensively for a more advanced related feeds function that is currently being bucket tested on parts of the site.

I hope these tips helped. If you have any questions just let us know!