cpwilson
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How to Setup RSS Feed for Google Alerts Using Coldfusion
Looking for some guidance on best way to construct an rss feed for google alerts to be used on a website, using coldfusion. Is there any sample code that I can look at and are there any restrictions on what can be shown. Goggle alerts are currently being received via email
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Whether you use ColdFusion or PHP or Smalltalk or Forth...
1) Google generates alerts from content changes on a site.
2) Google determines this by page scrapping (slow + error prone) or using sitemap files (fast + correct).
3) If your goal is for Google to become aware of site changes, to generate alerts for people, you'll keep your sitemap.xml (or equivalent) updated.
4) If you produce an RSS feed with many subscribers, then you'll keep your RSS feed up to date.
5) Be clear Google Alerts in no way relate to RSS feeds. If you've injected your RSS feed into your sitemap, this doesn't really buy you anything, as in most cases, an RSS feed provides a summary of existing content, so should not be indexed, as this can cause duplicate content penalties.
Also your sitemap.xml file should already contain all content changes.
6) If you do inject your RSS feed URL into your sitemap.xml file, be sure to use rel=canonical on all your content pages + ensure your RSS feed never uses rel=canonical.
7) Many sites have SEO problems when they use a CMS system like WordPress with a brain dead rel=canonical injection plugin, which incorrectly injects rel=canonical into RSS feeds, then the RSS feed uses large snippets with thin content pages.
This nightmare scenario (more common than you might think) creates a situation where Google (or other crawlers) are presented with multiple URLs (RSS feed + page/post slug), both of which contain rel=canonical, both of when have a large amount of content in common.
If you begin to see duplicate page penalties, especially a site wide penalty (every page/post involved), make very sure you don't have a rel=canonical problem due to attempting to trigger Google Alerts from RSS feed changes.