Archived Articles

	Understanding Trusted Feeds - Fact and Fiction
	Barry Lloyd | 07 October 03
	Over the past few months, more and more people have been discussing the concept of Trusted Feeds. They have been branded by some as “approved cloaking”, by others as “authorized spam” – but few have looked at the true facts behind the use of Trusted Feed technology, let alone understand how or when it can be used for the benefits of certain types of websites. This short article is designed to sort some of the facts from the fiction so that webmasters, people in the SEM industry and surfers can make up their own minds about the validity of using Trusted Feeds – plus determine themselves if they are “fair means or foul”! What is a Trusted Feed? Everyone is used to the idea of search engines crawling web pages. However, certain situations can arise when there is simply no web page to crawl – or the dynamic URLs that certain scripts employ mean that URLs are blocking or inhibiting spiders from crawling them fully. A typical example of this may be on a travel site. The site may consist simply of a search form with drop down menus on the front page. Into this search form the surfer may select a departure point (say – London), a destination (Florida) and a time period (December). When the enter button is hit, a dynamic page is produced from items currently in the agent’s database which includes a list of vacations or flights applicable to the surfer’s needs. It is impossible for this individual page to have been crawled as it has been created from data applicable only on the day of the search. This means that if the surfer had looked for “flights london florida december” on a search engine, it would have been impossible for this particular website to appear in the results, unless they had specifically produced a static page including the information required. Trusted Feeds overcome this problem. A Feed provider may give an XML file, spreadsheet or text file to the search engine that will accept the feed with the following information: Title to appear in the search results – “Cheap Flights from London to Florida in December”. Description to appear in the search results – “MakeMeTop Travel has cheap flights from London to Florida in December. Check the latest deals online.” 5 Key phrases to be taken into consideration. The URL to be displayed in the search results. A tracking URL (if required) through which the surfer will be redirected. The actual destination URL or page created by completing the search parameters (in this example). If static, this page may be spidered by the inclusion spiders to verify the feed data. 200 words of text to cover the content of the destination page. Lay out should be informative and descriptive of the actual content seen by the surfer when they arrive on the destination page. This, then, is the information that is given to the search engine and it is this content that is taken into consideration for ranking purposes. In the above example, you may have hundreds (if not thousands) of permutations of pages. Traditional methods of optimizing these pages are possible, but could be a very lengthy process, with pages having to be added and removed depending on the requirements of the website. Even if the work were carried out, it may take many months for these thousands of pages to be indexed – and by that time, they may be out of date! If, in order to get fast indexing, PFI (paid inclusion) is considered, this could be very expensive – with a fixed annual cost per page. With Feeds, you pay only when someone clicks on a search result. No click-throughs, no fee (though you may have to pay for feed construction and optimization). With Trusted Feeds, URLs can be added and deleted almost instantly – with no changes having to be made to the structure of the client site – just to the feed data. Oh, and you can target specific geographical areas (in some instances) too. All-in-all then, Trusted Feeds were designed as a method of allowing large database driven sites with deep, non-spiderable content to obtain listings that were specific to the data included within these sites. Separate the Facts from Fiction! Like all technology, there is the possibility of abuse. Search engines do trust providers to give them accurate information and route surfers to the deep content page on which that information exists. However, when feeds first started, some providers bent these rules and routed multiple listings to the same (often the home) page of the target site. Within a relatively short time (about a year) the rules were tightened – but many people still believe that Feeds are just legal “doorway” pages. In fact, if a search engine finds a feed doing same page redirects, it will drop the feed! Spam rules are (if anything) tighter on feed data than on standard results. All feeds are checked pretty strictly (and randomly) for relevance! Many people believe that feeds are just used when a site has a large number of pages and don’t want to change site content. Although this can be a legitimate use of a feed – it is easy to convince a client that they are probably better off in the long term optimizing these pages. Most clients who want feeds need them due to the fact that their pages are created dynamically from input data. As such there are often no pages to optimize – feed mechanisms are a highly effective way of providing an alternative to having to create thousands of static pages. In the case of where a site doesn’t want to change content, it is true that Feeds can be viewed as approved “cloaking”. The surfer doesn’t see the content provided to the search engine spider. However, in the case of my second example, there is no content that can be presented to a spider and the descriptive text in the feed is for the provider to accurately reflect the data that the surfer is going to see when they visit that page. Failure to do this would be grounds for the search engine to pull the entire feed! Is it cloaking? Well – maybe according to your definition of the term. Is it deceptive – absolutely not! Conclusion Trusted Feeds are accepted by all leading search engines with the exception of Google (currently). As more and more companies become aware of the power of search engine marketing, so the demand to get all their content indexed will increase. Trusted Feeds are another indication of the commercialization of search by which search engines are seeking a trade-off of mutual benefit to both feed users, through having their content indexed properly, and engines whom earn revenue from the indexing. Clients have the option to spend large sums on site redesign or can see what the results of successful optimization can do on their site through the use of a well set-up feed. However, prolonged use of feeds can be expensive – and in many instances we see clients realising that they could save money if they created/optimized pages for specific queries that are getting a lot of hits and put these pages into “standard” inclusion – where they pay nothing per click. So Trusted Feeds, like use of PPC engines, AdWords from Google, LookSmart CPC listings, standard Paid Inclusion and natural spidering, should be considered as part of the repertoire of facilities available to search engine marketers. In some situations, it can be the fastest and most cost-effective way for a website to get significant results across a broad spectrum of search portals. But, for the smaller site, it probably is not worth considering. Do they drive relevant traffic? Yes, by the bucket load! Otherwise, why would anyone use them? Trusted Feeds are available for AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Ask Jeeves/Teoma and Inktomi plus several other smaller engines. Feeds can be arranged directly with search engines or via their partners. Optimization of feeds and submission is often done by optimization specialists in conjunction with the search engines or their submission partners. So, is yesterday’s spam today’s Trusted Feed? I don’t believe so. But it is a very different way to get content listed from “traditional” free SEO methods. Ignoring the technology is not, in my opinion, an option. Understanding it properly and then being able to decide on its’ usefulness in individual situations adds benefit to every professional search engine marketer’s repertoire! Hopefully, this introduction will spark some rational debate.
	Article by Barry Lloyd, CEO of MakeMeTop. Barry Lloyd founded the MakeMeTop brand of SEO services in 1999 although he began search engine optimisation in 1997. Barry posts on several forums as a Senior or Veteran Member under the name MakeMeTop, is a Moderator on the IHelpYouServices Forums, has spoken at leading conferences on various aspects of search engine marketing and has written articles on specific aspects of the industry for webmasters world-wide. MakeMeTop now has offices in Northern Ireland, mainland UK and Singapore and does search engine marketing for over 200 clients throughout the World www.makemetop.co.uk
	Reproduction rights You may reproduce this article in any format as long as the content is not edited and the "About the author" portion above remains intact.