A plea for help! I am contributing a chapter to the soon-to-be-released 2nd edition of Rok Hrastnik’s e-book “Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS”. The chapter is on SEO and I am on the hunt for examples to incorporate on RSS feeds being used successfully to garner better search engine positions and traffic. Have you or any of your clients been able to leverage RSS in a way that benefits your search engine rankings? If so, I would like to hear how and what your results were. I am particularly interested in examples:

1. where you can show that a lot of inbound links came about because of your RSS feed, or
2. where you were able to influence or control the link text used in those inbound links by incorporating good keywords into your RSS item titles and those item titles were used as link text, or
3. where you are clicktracking your links but still getting credit for the link as a vote (i.e. it contributed to your “PageRank” score). Specifically, if you are using 301 permanent redirects instead of 302 temporary redirects on your clicktracking script, then the PageRank from that linking site will get passed on to you, but not if it is a 302. In other words, I would like to hear from anyone who is doing clicktracking w/ permanent redirects in your RSS feed.

I am on a pretty tight deadline, so your responses soonest would be absolutely fantastic! Thank you very much!