RSS Newsfeeds: "Are They Unsafe On Your Web Site?"

Released on = April 1, 2005, 9:39 am

Press Release Author = Victor George, Isleweb Limited UK

Industry = Internet & Online

Press Release Summary = If spammers have set their sights on RSS newsfeeds, what can be done to combat them?

Press Release Body = These days the big search engines such as Google and MSN Search actively look for fresh content on web pages. Having frequently updated content on your site is therefore important in search engine ranking and for remaining competitive. A popular way of obtaining fresh content is through Really Simple Syndication newsfeeds, or RSS for short. Webmasters who by-pass the scripting
language of these newsfeeds and extract the HTML recognize the value of RSS through the feed links contained. These links are given relevance, which is essential for enhancing search engine position. Unfortunately, it now appears that RSS feeds may be becoming infiltrated by spam.

RSS aggregators look for new items and let you know when they appear on a feed. A malicious feed could subtly change its entries to make them appear new and therefore include an advertising entry amongst its news entries a number of times a day. These could then be brought together with other RSS feeds and re-published as an
aggregate, thus giving the ad even more exposure. A simple feeder that slightly changes its articles to make them appear new is hard to detect. Future ads may well appear as pop-ups, and if they go to the background, we will never know which feed produced it.

If spammers have set their sights on RSS newsfeeds, what can be done to combat them? Isleweb Limited, a UK company based in Buxton, has been looking into this and found that although email spam can now be filtered fairly successfully, current RSS aggregators lack similar filtering technology. This lack of filtering technology is
probably due to the fact that if it was employed there would be a risk of filtering out genuine content. Isleweb researchers have come to the conclusion that in future if you need proper fresh content and not spam on your web site, then you should avoid RSS feeds altogether.

More information can be found at autopageupdate.com

Web Site = http://www.isleweb.com

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