Google To Add RSS Feeds To SERPs

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, October 9, 2008 Comments (1)

(Source) Quite frankly, it seems a little odd to me that this isn’t already an option, and I’ve wondered in the past why it wasn’t. McGee even points out that Google is the only major search engine not to offer such a feature. That is odd in itself, since Google is so often the trendsetter, particularly when it comes to anything search related, not to mention the company’s vested interest in RSS feeds with it’s ownership of Feedburner.

OK, so Google will soon start offering RSS feeds for its SERPs and Chris Crum wonders why it hasn’t started doing this already. Maybe it’s because the SERPs change so often so fast? I mean, sure you can subscribe to Yahoo! and MSN search results, but if those search results are inferior to Google’s then does it really matter?

I’m all for innovation. I’m all for improving services. I’m just not sure that RSS feeds for Google’s search results are a huge improvement. Yes, webmasters can keep tabs on their rankings more quickly and easily and that will add some value, but beyond that there really isn’t a huge benefit that you don’t already get with Google Alerts. If you want to track keyword usage and developments in a particular niche then I’d say that Google Alerts is a far better tool. The only real practical benefit I can see from SERP RSS feeds is the ability to watch your search engine optimization rankings and you should already have tools for that.

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1 Comment

Comment by Chris Lang

Made Thursday, 6 of November , 2008 at 5:28 pm

Actually I reported on this last month. Feeds have been available in Blogsearch for the last two months.

This is REAL powerful Nick, you can get an RSS feed in your Google Reader with every blog article published that ranks even remotely under the search term in Reader in real time.

What you will see even more quickly is social media links and that is a social strategy in itself.

Think about that social bookmarking users looking for breaking stories.

Think about using Google search commands to create mashups in Blogseach then consuming the feed and stay up to date in real time as the blog pings Google and publishes the article.

Think what you can do just with site: on a site that does not use a blog platform.

Think about……

Well actually I wrote the rest here. Nick I hope you don’t mind me linking to my site, buy then we do know each other.

http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=182

This is a little more over the top so it is best on my site, Nick.

Looking forward to doing some more guest articles but I am swamped for now. – Chris Lang