I was never a big user of RSS feeds. I either found them updated too frequently, too little, or simply uninteresting. Then I found this website:

http://artofmanliness.com/

Referred by a Slashdot Thread I found myself pouring over archives, and wanting more. On the advice of this same thread, I checked out Lifehacker, the Reuters Science and Technology feeds, and Consumerist.

So, how does RSS relate to search engine optimization? From the Google Patent Application # 20050071741:

Documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change, even if that rate of change is relatively high. The amount of change may also be a factor in this scoring. For example, documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change when that amount of change is greater than some threshold might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change or an amount of change is less than the threshold.

Not only does this tell us that what we all assumed to be true (even optimized content needs to be kept fresh and updated, but it also points us to RSS as an easy way to saturate our site with our target keywords.

Just one bit of advice for anyone looking to add an RSS feed to their site, DON’T USE JAVASCRIPT. The content won’t be indexed.

For anyone looking for a good RSS reader, I recommend the Sage add-on for Firefox.