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What is an RSS feed and how to use it

Mack Faviola

The Internet is overloaded with information on a wide variety of topics, and very often it is repetitive. But there is a great way to structure and filter this data – it is an RSS feed. The peak of its popularity has passed, but this does not mean that this technology has fallen into oblivion.

What is RSS

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is an automatically generated summary in rss or xml format that displays recently published articles and news. A hyperlink is provided to the full version of the content. This format is often used by information portals and blogs. RSS feed can be connected to Yandex.News, Google News, Yandex.Zen, Turbo Pages, etc.

How RSS works

Everything is simple here – an article or news is published on the site. After that, a special script puts the announcement of this publication into an updated RSS file. Then this file is read by special programs or online resources called aggregators. And then these aggregators notify users about new materials on the site. Notifications may come not every time after the publication of new material, but with a specified periodicity.

Pros and cons of RSS

  • First, it is worth considering the advantages of an RSS feed for users.
  • Collection of all published information in a single stream that can be quickly viewed.
  • Free use.
  • Quick notification – as soon as an article is published on the site, the subscriber will almost immediately learn about it.
  • Lack of advertising.
  • Saves traffic, especially on mobile devices.
  • Time saving. It is easier, of course, to look at the summary of new published materials and find something interesting in it, than to leaf through the entire resource several times.
  • And now let’s see what pluses the site will get if it will be used RSS technology.
  • The introduction of such a feed gives an increase in traffic and increased engagement of the audience. This will also help to move up in the search engine.
  • Increasing the recognizability of the resource among subscribers.
  • When reading the announcement is a high probability that the user will open a link to the site to read the material in full.
  • The minuses of this format, of course, there are, and in modern realities they are more than significant.
  • Overabundance of information. If the user subscribes to many feeds from different sites, he will be overloaded with information and will not have time to process it.
  • Content theft. Larger resources can take unique content from your site and pass it off as their own. Even providing a link will not save the situation, and if there is no link at all, it is much more problematic to prove the status of the original source.