Throughout all of the work I have done on my blogs: adding content, getting them ranked, testing...I have neglected learning how to do one simple thing...add and submit an rss feed!

I've looked around for some information on this very simple procedure, but can find very little.

Can I just add "feed" to the end of my WP blog url's so they read website.com/feed/?

I really have no idea how to do this. What I want to do is submit my feeds to rss feed directories. From what I understand, rss feeds are already built into WP blogs.

So if I submit website.com/feed/ to an rss directory, will it include every blog post on that blog? Don't know how to do this, please help.

Originally Posted by mpw45233

Can I just add "feed" to the end of my WP blog url's so they read website.com/feed/?

It depends on your permalink settings. If you're using the default permalinks setting just add this query string to your blog url: ?feed=rss2 (ex website.com/?feed=rss2). For all other settings you should be able to use the /feed/ url (as well as the ?feed=rss2 url).

Originally Posted by mpw45233

So if I submit website.com/feed/ to an rss directory, will it include every blog post on that blog? Don't know how to do this, please help.

In your admin panel go to 'Reading' under the settings menu. Set the 'Syndication feeds show the most recent' option to however many posts you want to include in your feed.

Thanks for the response Matt. I'm using the custom permalink structure (pretty permalinks) so I guess it would be website.com/feed/

I should probably mention that I'm doing this partially for backlinking purposes, so I want all of my posts displayed. I've found some high pr rss directories that are do follow and well moderated. And the links appear to point back directly to the blog posts.

--So if I just submit website.com/feed/, will that automatically submit all of my blog posts? Will it submit the ones that are already posted, or just future posts?

Another thing is that I have my theme set to display manual excerpts for my blog and category pages (as opposed to the first 155 characters of post).

--Will the rss feed display the manual excerpts I've created, or just the first 155 characters of the post?

Can I get some help please???? )

You have to specify the number of posts to include in the feed. I'm not sure if there is a way to have it include all of them, but if you input an arbitrarily large number it may work. Depending on how many posts there are on your blog it may not be a good idea to include all of them; if you have hundreds of posts then the output of your rss feed is going to be pretty big.

The feed should include both past and future posts. As for the excerpts I'm not sure. However, you could easily find out by testing it.

why do you like to include all posts in feed? there's no need because it will be crawled automatically.

Originally Posted by NullPointer

You have to specify the number of posts to include in the feed. I'm not sure if there is a way to have it include all of them, but if you input an arbitrarily large number it may work. Depending on how many posts there are on your blog it may not be a good idea to include all of them; if you have hundreds of posts then the output of your rss feed is going to be pretty big.

The feed should include both past and future posts. As for the excerpts I'm not sure. However, you could easily find out by testing it.

Thanks a bunch Matt! My big problem I guess is that I don't understand the basics of WP blogs...But I'm learning.

And I don't even understand fully how rss feed directories work. But I was looking through some the other day and saw lots of backlinks pointing to the sites that were submitting.

So would having too many posts submitted to an rss feed site hurt my site performance??? I can't imagine that any of my current blogs would end up with over 200...maybe 300 posts, I'm thinking maybe.....80 or so...150 maybe??

Anyway I do appreciate your help.

It won't hurt your overall site's performance, only the performance of your feed. With 150 posts in your feed the output size will be ten times that of a feed using the default settings.

In any case I'm not sure there is any advantage to having so many posts in your feed. Typically RSS feeds are meant to retrieve a few of the most recent entries, not your entire blog. I imagine that many of the feed directories you are referring to won't even bother looking at so many posts in a single feed. They may even reject it all together due to the increased response time and size.

Originally Posted by NullPointer

It won't hurt your overall site's performance, only the performance of your feed. With 150 posts in your feed the output size will be ten times that of a feed using the default settings.

In any case I'm not sure there is any advantage to having so many posts in your feed. Typically RSS feeds are meant to retrieve a few of the most recent entries, not your entire blog. I imagine that many of the feed directories you are referring to won't even bother looking at so many posts in a single feed. They may even reject it all together due to the increased response time and size.

You're right Matt. I just saw do follow backlinks and I got all giddy. Don't tell Chris!

Here's an example: http://www.leighrss.com/rss.feed/100...loss-tips.html

Look at all those do follow backlinks Matt. Those look yummy!

That's one of the reasons I'm interested in RSS...a backlink to every post!! Awesome!!!

I'm a little out of my element here, but what I know of directories is that the overwhelming majority of them are useless. Yes you get a link to your site, but it is buried along with tons of other links in a site that no person would ever use (other than to submit their own links).

Again, I don't know much about the subject, but given that search engines want to serve the most useful results, wouldn't they have caught on to the fact that links in these directories aren't any sort of indicator of how relevant a particular page is, only how willing the owner is to go through the submission process for an uncountably large number of link directories out there?

Originally Posted by NullPointer

I'm a little out of my element here, but what I know of directories is that the overwhelming majority of them are useless. Yes you get a link to your site, but it is buried along with tons of other links in a site that no person would ever use (other than to submit their own links).

Again, I don't know much about the subject, but given that search engines want to serve the most useful results, wouldn't they have caught on to the fact that links in these directories aren't any sort of indicator of how relevant a particular page is, only how willing the owner is to go through the submission process for an uncountably large number of link directories out there?

That's a good point. The main reason I became interested in rss is that I came across a blog in my niche that consists entirely of other peoples rss feeds. I don't know if there is a name for this particular kind of blog, but it's just the rss feeds and comments via Commentluv. So they get all of their content for free and then monetize with infolinks.

I'm pretty sure they would accept my rss feed. And it's not a high PR blog, there is also lots of duplicate content. But for each post that goes through you get 3 do follow links, 2 in the blog post, and one in the sidebar.

But here's what got me really interested, if there is a link in the excerpt you include (which is essentially the whole blog post +continue reading here...) then that link is included in the "blog post" also.

So those are in context links in the middle of a blog post...those should be much better than a blog comment link, or a link in a resource box etc...

Like I said earlier, it's not a great blog, but most of the "posts" are indexed. Most of the original content that it does have is because of the Commentluv aspect of the blog. But if I wanted to make sure that my posts with my backlinks are unique, then I could just use a manual excerpt so that none of my blog content is on their site. Though it wouldn't be unique if I also submitted to other sites.

I'm pretty sure they would let me slip an in context backlink (to one of my pages) in the excerpt/blogpost...everyone else is. And the site doesn't have that many contributors yet. If they accept you then you get your own author page. I'm looking for more sites like this.

So the cons are--the blog isn't great.

The pros are--in context backlinks that are in the post, with your chosen anchor text--And it's easy.