XML Feeds – The Ideal Way to Submit Large Web Sites to the Engines
The ideal way to submit large web sites – by Robin Nobles
XML feeds. Sounds very technical, doesn't it? In truth, it's amazing how simple XML feeds really are.
Let's say that you have a large web site with more than 500 pages. Maybe your online e-commerce site sells thousands of products and it isn't feasible to use pay inclusion due to prohibitive cost.
If you were to leave it to the engines to find and spider your pages on their own time – the preferred method of entry other than pay inclusion – your result will likely be the majority of your pages are invisible due to being buried several layers deep within the site's file structure. Such pages are difficult-to-impossible for SE spiders to find.
Also, large e-commerce sites are usually dynamically generated, which means the pages don't actually exist until the moment a user submits a query. Then, a database generates a page on-the-fly based on that search. Though the search engines are certainly getting better at indexing dynamic content, getting each of your 500+ pages into an engine's database is difficult at best and impossible in most cases – unless you pay to have a fee for inclusion.
Solution? XML feeds!
XML data feeds were predominately designed for large web sites. Most users of XML feeds are e-commerce sites with hundreds of different products, and most are database driven.
Through normal spidering, these pages would never be found, because they're basically part of the "invisible" web. That's why XML data feeds were created – as a means of getting deep content found by the search engines.
How do XML feeds work?
Because each engine has a different required format for their XML feed, it's generally easier to go through a reputable and reliable liaison company like PositionTech - http://www.positiontech.com. Such companies know just what each engine needs to see on their XML data feed and have an already established partner relationship with the engines to provide what they call Trusted Feed programs.
By using a liaison company you'll save yourself from the hassle of trying to format the data yourself. Instead, you'll be guided through th...
