Publisher's Guide to RSS

Publisher's Guide to Syndication FAQ

What is a syndicated feed?

There are two types of feeds: RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") and Atom. Websites and blogs use either or both formats to syndicate a summary of their latest content, which can take the format of headlines, photos, podcasts, stocks, scores, maps, and more. Users subscribe to feeds via news aggregators such as My Yahoo!, which gather the syndicated content from whichever sources a user selects and then display it all in one convenient location. Rather than visit each site individually to see what's new, users simply scan the syndicated headlines (or photos, or podcasts, etc.) and click through to the originating website to get the rest of the story. Users can even feature syndicated feeds on their blogs or public My Yahoo! page for their own readers to enjoy.

For more details about feeds:

• Wikipedia: Web Feed An overview of feeds
• BBC: The Feed Factory A basic, accessible introduction to feeds
• RSS Advisory Board RSS specifications, tutorials, and discussions
• AtomEnabled Atom overview and specifications

What types of feeds does Yahoo! support?

Yahoo! prefers RSS 2.0, but will also support 1.0 and Atom 1.0. We strongly urge publishers to use just one format to avoid feed duplication issues.

To distribute multimedia content such as audio files (podcasts), images, and digital video, use the "Media RSS" module, which supplements the enclosure capabilities of RSS 2.0. For more details, please visit the Yahoo! Media RSS Syndication FAQ.

What should I do if the location of my feed changes?

If a feed is moved or given a new name, here's what you do to make sure it's still accessible:

• If your new feed is on the same server as the original feed, but with a different filename, use a 301 permanent redirect to point to the new feed. Do NOT resubmit the new file to Yahoo!. To create a 301 redirect, add the following code to the ".htaccess" file at the root of your server:

  redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

• If the location of your feed has changed because you've switched to a new host (such as FeedBurner), set up a temporary redirect from the old Master Subscription URL that points to the new host URL, then add a "rel=self" tag to the new feed that points to the old Master Subscription URL.

• It's always a good practice, if you do need to change your feed URL, to update your existing feed with a final post indicating your intention to change to a new URL with pointers to where your subscribers can subscribe to your new feed. This final post will then be the most recent post that your existing subscribers will see and most recent post for any new subscribers that happen upon your old feed URL if they do not get redirected.

Why should I avoid using multiple URLs for the same feed?

Yahoo! encourages you to submit feeds for as many sites as you have. However you should avoid submitting multiple versions of the same feed. For example, feeds such as http://www.publisher.com/feed.xml, http://publisher.com/rss/feed.xml, and http://publisher.com/rss/feed.xml?rand=123 may all provide the same content, but distributing all three URLs could create a number of problems:

• Duplicate feeds generate unnecessary traffic because the same physical feed is updated more often than necessary, and this slows down the update process.

• When the update process slows down, it diminishes the freshness of the content feed.

• Offering multiple feeds dilutes the number of subscribers for each individual feed, and since the popularity of a feed determines its placement in "Add Content" search results, the feed becomes harder for new users to discover.

How do I consolidate feeds if multiple URLs were used in the past?

To alleviate the problems that come from duplicate feeds, create a Master Subscription URL by placing a few lines of code directly into the one feed that you want all subscribers to access.

For RSS feeds:

<atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/
<http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom> Atom" 
    rel="self" 
    href="MASTER_SUBSCRIPTION_URL" 
    type="application/rss+xml" />

For ATOM feeds:

<link
    rel="self" 
    href="MASTER_SUBSCRIPTION_URL" 
    type="application/atom+xml" />

Yahoo! also supports HTTP redirects and RSS redirects. Here is the order of precedence (where the first condition to be satisfied is the URL that will be used going forward):

1. <link rel="self" ... />

2. Permanent redirects (HTTP 301), temporary redirects (HTTP 302), and RSS redirects (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssRedirect)

3. Original URL the user subscribed to

How often does Yahoo! check my feed for updates?

Our self-scheduling software agent finds, categorizes, and checks your feed for updates (this process is called "polling") anywhere from every thirty minutes to no less than once a day, depending on how frequently your content tends to change. This "adaptive" polling method ensures that your content updates efficiently without wasting bandwidth.

You can also manually update the Yahoo! feed database by entering the following in your browser address window:

http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[THE URL OF YOUR FEED]

To automatically update Yahoo! every time you publish, see the next section on Automatic Notification.

How do I set up my feed to automatically notify Yahoo! whenever I update my site?

To make sure My Yahoo! automatically schedules an immediate refresh of your site whenever you add new content, use the Yahoo! API. The two interfaces currently available are: REST and XML-RPC.

The REST interface:

URL: http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/rss/ping
Parameter(s): u=<site or feed url>
HTTP method: GET

For example:

http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories
http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://site.example.com/blog

The XML-RPC interface:

RPC endpoint: http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
Method name: weblogUpdates.ping
Parameter(s):
    Name of site (string)
    URL of site or RSS feed (string)
Returns Struct with two members:
    flerror (boolean) which is true if an error occurred.
    message (string) which contains "OK" (if successful) or the error message

And here is an example of a typical request and response:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
 <methodName>weblogUpdates.ping</methodName>
 <params>
  <param>
   <value>
    <string>Top Stories</string>
   </value>
  </param>
  <param>
   <value>
    <string>http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories</string>
   </value>
  </param>
 </params>
</methodCall>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<methodResponse>
 <params>
  <param>
   <value>
    <struct>
     <member>
      <name>flerror</name>
      <value>
       <boolean>0</boolean>
      </value>
     </member>
     <member>
      <name>message</name>
      <value>
       <string>OK</string>
      </value>
     </member>
    </struct>
   </value>
  </param>
 </params>
</methodResponse>

How do I prevent my feeds from being listed in the search results for the Yahoo! Feed Database?

The "Add Content" feature in My Yahoo! allows users to search the Yahoo! Feed Database for available feeds. To prevent your feed from being searched in the Yahoo! Feed Database, while still allowing users to subscribe to your content, add the following code to your feed:

<meta xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
	name="robots" content="noindex" />

How do I block Yahoo! from syndicating my Feed via My Yahoo?

Although most sites prefer the added traffic that comes from syndication via My Yahoo!, some publishers would rather not make their feeds available this way. If you prefer not to participate in syndication via My Yahoo!, here's how to opt out:

To block all robots from the entire site, add the following to the robots.txt file at the root of your server:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To block My Yahoo! from the entire site, add the following to robots.txt:

User-agent: YahooFeedSeeker

To block My Yahoo! from a selected feed or feeds, add the following to robots.txt:

User-agent: YahooFeedSeeker
Disallow: /myblog/rss/myblog.xml
Disallow: /myotherblog/rss/myblog.xml

What is "Autodiscovery," and how do I implement it?

Autodiscovery is a way to let applications (such as the Yahoo! Toolbar or your browser) know if your website or blog has a feed. To see if your website currently supports Autodiscovery, visit your site using the Yahoo! Toolbar, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox. If the Yahoo! Toolbar has a blue "plus" button next to the My Yahoo! button on the toolbar, or the feed icon is illuminated in the IE7 navigation bar, or Firefox has an orange box highlighted in the lower right corner, then your feed has already been detected.

Otherwise, please insert the following code inside the <head> of the top level "index" page, the central feed, and anything at the article/post level:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
	title="[YOUR FEED TITLE]" href="[URL TO FEED FILE]">

For more details about Autodiscovery, please visit RSS Advisory Board: Autodiscovery.

How do I reprioritize the order in which my content is displayed?

Most publishers display content in reverse chronological order (most recent first), but some choose to exercise editorial control within feeds by marking certain key stories as more important and prioritizing those. My Yahoo! sorts by the order of items in your RSS feed and not "pubdate."

How do I access the traffic data for my feed?

Yahoo! generates approximate stats for the number of active subscribers and pageviews for your feed, based on a 30-day rolling average. This information can be found in your logfiles, under the user agent "YahooFeedSeeker."

Here is an example of access log information:

  66.218.65.52 - - [23/Mar/2004:08:13:30 -0800]
  "GET /blog/rss2.xml HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-"
  "YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0;
   MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html;
   users 236; views 36994)"

How do I customize the icon that appears next to my feed?

A favicon (short for "favorite icon") is a small graphic that appears next to a website's URL in the navigation pane, next to a website's name in a bookmarks listing, or next to a website's feed. To add a customized icon to your feed listing, upload a graphic with the name "favicon.ico" to the root directory of your feed.

To avoid unnecessary traffic to the favicon.ico, configure your server to instruct browsers to cache favicons.

For example, via Apache (with mod_headers installed):

    <FilesMatch "\.ico$">
      Header set Expires "expiryDate"
    </FilesMatch>

Publishers can set "expiryDate" to whatever date they like (e.g. "Mon, 28 Jul 2014 23:30:00 GMT").

How do I feature other site feeds on My Yahoo! or my blog?

To include feeds from other websites on My Yahoo! or your blog, here are some tips to get you started:

• The Big List of Yahoo! Feeds offers a nice overview of some of the many feed possibilities available to you.

• To include feeds on My Yahoo!, check the My Yahoo! FAQ for details. You can also create a public My Yahoo!.

• Most of the popular blog-hosting services (for example Blogger, Typepad, and Wordpress) offer a way to add a feed, either via existing template-editing tools or an added plug-in.

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