I have experienced some difficulties using RSS Feed instead of Sitemap. I have had some problems using RSS feed to track changes on my blog, to help Google with indexing and crawling. After submitting Rss URL on Google webmasters page I got an error message reporting about errors.
Sitemap errors and warnings:
- Invalid url
- Invalid xml: too many tags
- Invalid xml attribute
After solving this problem I can give you advises and tips to solve this problem. First, you need a very useful and vaunted plugin. This plugin is named Google XML sitemaps and was made to generate sitemap.xml file. I want to note that there was no sitemap.xml file on my blog in root folder and I was using RSS feed. It took me just five minutes to configure the plugin. I’m not talking about it now so let’s get back to this topic. Let’s assume you have this plugin activated and running. I will tell you advantages and disadvantages using RSS and Sitemap.
You can look at the picture to see the differences. I just want to mention that RSS Feed used as a format is not very advantageous because it can index/scan 5 URLs only. And don’t forget about permanent errors using it.
And take a look at the picture showing the usage of sitemap.xml file. Here I want to mention that the advantage is the number of URLs in Sitemap. 180 URLs instead of 5 are much better.
Now it’s your choice to decide what sort of format to use. I prefer Sitemap. After installation of this plugin I got rid of unnecessary problems.
This is just one plugin used by bloggers so you can check other popular plugins for bloggers.
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May 26, 2011 at 19:35:58
Thank you for writing this article. I really enjoyed it. I work in web design too. Keep up the excellent work!