RSS feeds are often confused with datafeeds. RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication, and this is just an easy way for people to distribute and share various types of content and information between websites.
RSS feeds are commonly used by blog software tools and news based websites. When you publish a blog based website it will create an RSS feed which people can subscribe to. They read your new entries in an RSS feed reader.
RSS can also be imported onto other people’s websites however, and this is where the confusion with datafeeds comes in. When a website imports RSS feeds, it is getting part or all of the content available on another website. Usually the content imported is articles and blog postings.
Most websites do not publish a full RSS feed, they publish excerpts instead. So if another website were to import those RSS feeds to create content on their own site, they’d only get a small portion of the actual content.
Importing RSS feeds from other websites is popular with some internet marketers, because they see this as a way to get an “instant” website filled with focused niche topic content. You’ll often hear this technique referred to as “scraping” because a website built this way is simply scraping content from other places instead of contributing new stuff of it’s own.
Scraping was popular – and quite profitable – many years ago. Google did not like it back then however, and they went through and dumped most of the scraper websites from their index. As of 2009 the practice is becomming popular again, but the availability of new automation tools which have been released in recent years has allowed more sophisticated scraper sites to be created, and some of them are now much more like syndicated news sites.
