Link Building RSS Feed Reclamation Technique
Recently, I discovered a technique for reclaiming RSS feeds for link building purposes. Many RSS feed usernames on Feedburner, for example, are available to be claimed. Claiming an old username and attaching it to the RSS feed, there’s a good likelihood of you being able to take advantage of links pointing to the feeds. Some RSS Feeds also have traffic and clicks associated with them, which is a bonus. I have been testing this on a few websites, and it seems to be a promising new SEO technique for those who are looking for something new and who understand the risks.
I’ve decided to share my knowledge of this link building technique for a few reasons:
- It’s important that you know about this, so you can check your own RSS feeds on your website. Make sure you’re not linking out to a Feedburner feed unless it’s live and you’re still under control of it.
- It’s important to crawl your own website, to make sure that you’re linking out to who you want to link out to: it’s a part of regular website maintenance.
- If you’re wanting to try out a new link building technique and you understand the risks of doing this, then here you go.
- The more you know about SEO techniques like this, the better SEO and marketer you’ll be.
I decided that it was best to post a video explaining this link building RSS reclamation technique on video. Especially since it needs some explaining, and how it works. Below is the embedded video, along with a transcription of the video. Of course, subscribe to my YouTube Channel if you’d like to see more of videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/hartzerconsulting
Links Mentioned in the Video
I mentioned several links in the video, here they are:
- feeds.feedburner.com (look at both the https and http versions, but also feeds2.feedburner.com
- Majestic.com for the link analysis – they tend to show more links and pages.
- Claim the feeds here: https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds once you’re logged into a Google Account.
Do you have any questions? Feel free to comment on the YouTube video, on Twitter, or email me.
Bill Hartzer (00:03):
Hi, this is Bill Hartzer from Hartzer Consulting. And wanted to tell you today a little bit about the alternative of link building method that I have actually been testing and the one and, and this method I know a lot of people have been kind of waiting to hear of, of what this new link building method is. And I’m going to go through it a little bit today. I don’t want to take too long. I know there will be a lot of questions, so I may have to record some additional videos about implementation, but this is essentially a, you can think of it. As I try to put a name on it, actually RSS feed, link, reclamation something, you know, something to do with that. Let me go ahead and share my screen and I’ll get into it.
Bill Hartzer (01:11):
Okay. I’m going to move stuff around a little bit, so it should be able to see my screen here. I’m going to move things. Okay. So let’s say we have a website. This is a good example, symphony.com just for kind of a random site. And at about 10, 15 years ago what happened was, is, is we started to add, you know, social, a social icons and social media icons in, if you look at the, the footer here we have, we, you know, links to get hub. So, you know, Twitter or Facebook, YouTube, and so forth, but you’ll notice that there is an RSS feed icon. And if you look at that particular link that is feeds.feedburner.com/symphonyblog. Okay. Now keep in mind the new username is symphony blog. Now here’s the concept. The concept of this is that you create an RSS feed or you take the, the, the RSS feed of your particular site.
Bill Hartzer (02:24):
And essentially you find on feed burner. You find feeds that have links that actually for whatever reason have been removed. And those are actually those feed burner feeds are 4 0 4. Now, if you find essentially, if you find the username of one that is a 4 0 4, then essentially you can claim the feed and you can claim while you, what you’re doing is you’re claiming that username, that unique username. And what you do is you claim that unique username, and then you then connect your RSS feed with add user her name. And instantly I can tell you is that we basically, the feed will work again and through feedback. So here’s the idea let’s go to majestic and let’s look particularly at feeds.feedburner.com. We want to look at the winks. Okay. And obviously it’s a there’s, you know, over a billion links millions and millions 245,000 unique domains and so forth, linking to feed burner fees.
Bill Hartzer (03:43):
Well, if we look at pages in particular pages would be here’s. I go to example feeds.feedburner.com. Okay. That particular name for whatever reason Google did not or Google Majestic didn’t crawl that, but they have found 213,000 winks from 41 88 domains. We don’t know whether that for the out, you know, we don’t know whether that’s a 4 0 4 right now. However, if you were to use, tell us, take that particular name and see if that can be claimable. So basically the idea is that you take your particular feed. You go, you know, you have to go and log in to a Google account. So something like the you know, it’s feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds. Yeah. If you go to feeds.feedburner.com, you’ll probably get redirected over there. So essentially here’s a few ones that I’ve claimed. What you’ll do is you’ll put in your feed name you know, you are, you know, URL of your feed. Yeah. Next.
Bill Hartzer (05:12):
And there’s an issue with that particular feed. So I’m not going to claim it. I have a but essentially what you’re going to do is you’re going to come to a page, you know, and, and what you’re going to do is you can name it, put in a title, whatever you want, there’s your feed. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to put in the username, right. You found, okay. And as, as, as her space initially, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to claim that feed and what’s going to happen. Is this particular feed, fierce, your best McFee that I found and the username was the future is make feed. I pointed it to this as a sample. And it had 67 subscribers. Well, that kind of is interesting because that is not only just, and this was let’s you know, let’s look at this right now.
Bill Hartzer (06:10):
Let’s look at the back links. If you were to actually look at the back links, that particular feed and you can actually see that, you know, there are 18 backlinks trustful of 13 citations while at 10, and this future futurist make.com is still linking to it. Okay. So the idea is that, you know, there you go, you got three links just by creating an rss feed going back and recreating the feed and pointing and creating, claiming the username, obviously symphony cloud or, you know, the symphony, you know, feed burner feed is, is still there, you know, and, and that’s fine. But what you’ll find is if you go to, if you start to look at backlinks to fees on feed your feed, burner.com and you look at pages and you start to kind of digging in a little bit you actually, now we can actually, and here we can actually look at ones that there’s a hotter and 18 feeds right there.
Bill Hartzer (07:25):
Probably some of these are pages that cannot be claimed. Some of them may not, but if you start to dig around and do some, you know, unique searches, so here’s one real hot new hip hop, okay. 108 hundred 75,000 backlinks it was a sports and boxing topic. And if you were to claim this particular feed on your feed and pointed to yours and, and use that particular username, okay. Let’s look and see real quick. I want to see what the backlinks kind of look like to that one. And, you know, just to verify, cause I like to verify stuff and don’t like to just you know, go blind here. Here’s the thing is that, you know, 875 back thousand back when it’s just probably a, site-wide a, site-wide wink from 875,000, you know, or hundreds of thousands of pages.
Bill Hartzer (08:33):
There’s also HTTP. So you might want to also look in particular at, at that as well, they should keep you version. So here is a good, you know, here’s the http version of that. Now hip-hop dot com. So this is, you know, this is, if you’re, if you have a music and related, you may want to create an RSS feed and get some of these, you know, some of these links, I’m not in a really big fan of oh zeros, but there are some links and it historically it had 1.8 million links. So here’s the idea is that, remember that there’s a couple of different ways that people link to RSS fees, you need to create your RSS feed. You need to find feeds on FeedBurner that have 404s. Then, then just basically use the, my feeds and, and recreate those.
Bill Hartzer (09:30):
You will see there’s a couple of different ways that people link to RSS feeds and use. One is what most common are, site-wide links that you’ll get, and that will link to your feed. Okay. Your feed burner. Then the next is in the code. You’ll get the source code. You may see on certain sites where we see the linkage there sometimes in the header section of the page you may actually so see a link, a rail link yeah. We’ll link REL RSS feed and it will, it will link there to the feed burner. That’s another way that, that w that link will be there. That’s on automatically. Okay. The other third way is, is that a lot of sites actually use feed birder and feeds and content. So they may be pulling in automatically here’s an exam, not really an example, but kind of a situation where they are, you know, they’re pulling some headlines, these headlines, or even down here, these could be pulled automatically from an RSS feed.
Bill Hartzer (10:46):
If you were to actually put that feedback, then your content and your links would then be on that side. I’ve seen that situation that also you have the Yahoo home page where finally you have people who have customized their Yahoo page with RSS feeds of their favorite sites. And somewhere on here, here’s the, you know, they will have their own, you know, weather, but they’ll also have their own customer as us feeds that can bring traffic and clicks. I have one particular site that’s getting them out of that and clicks a day because of the fact that it is, and it actually is Ian from people’s a Yahoo homepage. So just to recap, if you look at it, you’re going to need to create your particular RSS. You’re going to be able, you’re going to have to have an RSS feed, a valid RSS feed.
Bill Hartzer (11:42):
If you have WordPress, you can actually use something like Google news publisher to create those RSS feeds. Once you have the RS, the feed URL, which is, could be your homepage, could be also every, any category laws. I’ll also have an RSS feed take that URL, find 4 0 4 hours of from feed fees, dot fender, bird feeds for bot feedburner.com. Okay. Find those links, find the pages, find the 4 0 4 and then go to your feeds and create the feed. It’s that simple. I have just even a few minutes ago, added some more feeds feed burners going in a maintenance mode in July, but you will still be able to indefinitely create those feeds. There’s not going to be a problem with that. Also I would also mention that all of the, there’s two things I’m releasing this information because for two, basically for two reasons, number one, the main fact is that may need to be aware of if you are with your site, or if you are linking out to a FeedBurner feed you need to check it and you need to check and make sure that in and who you’re waking out to, because somebody can be using that and taking that feed.
Bill Hartzer (13:12):
Number two, is that on the other hand there are four fours and usernames that you can train just like Luke cramming, a Twitter account, claiming a, you know, some other username on some other account. Finally. I’m just going to say that obviously this could be considered, I would say probably gray hat, marketing, gray hat, SEO and, you know use it as you want to. And that keep in mind that, you know, I personally, I think maybe the worst case scenario is that the site owner could ask, could find out it’s good, get, ask you why your content is on their site and the other, you know, and obviously you could, you could take it down. The other part is that you need to be aware, you know, that this is, this is this, this happens to sites and that people do claim their feed and they put their, you know and, and so forth if you have four or four.
Bill Hartzer (14:24):
The other part is the fact that you know, like I said the links at some point, since this, since people are probably going to be using this technique now they could just not be good links anymore and, and just be discounted and, and, you know, not be valuable anymore. So, like I said, go ahead, go out and find the feeds on feedburner. There are right now about 11 million feeds that are available. And so there are out of the 11 million I’ve just in a very small, limited crawling activity of a cup, you know, of pay. You know, I have been able to find at least a hundred thousand that are how far are fours that are claimable. I’ve been doing, I’ve been contesting us for a few months and on term after four months, it does look like the legs are still good and everything’s working fine.
Bill Hartzer (15:30):
Do you have any questions offer, don’t forget to make comment below. And if you do feel that this is a good link-building trip link building tip for you personally, and that item, I’m not asking for any payments or anything, but I do ask that you consider donating, donating to the to the DFW sem.org. And the PayPal address for them is info@dfwsem.org Dallas Fort Worth search Engine Marketing Association. And they’re a great group and that they’re a nonprofit and the whole idea of gift DFWSEM is to help promote knowledge in this industry. And that’s why I giving out information like this. So you can be a better marketer and a better SEO. Thanks for watching feel free to subscribe because I will be coming back and sharing some other tips like this fairly soon. Thanks.