RSS feeds are a great way for you to keep up to date on your favorite websites. But they can be an even greater tool for a webmaster. You can syndicate RSS feeds on your own site, adding continuously updating content without any work of your own.

Use PHP to Parse an XML File and Syndicate the Feed

In order to syndicate an RSS feed on your site, you’ll need to read the XML file somehow. PHP is great for this.

Previously, you would have had to write your own XML parser to do this. This is possible – but it takes some time and it can get fairly complicated.

Thankfully, PHP now comes with SimpleXML built-in. You can use this great package to quickly and easily read XML files.

Since RSS feeds follow a standard structure, you can use SimpleXML to read the file, manipulate the data, and output a list of links and/or descriptions onto your website. All you need to know is how to use SimpleXML and how an RSS feed is structured.

Here’s a tutorial on how to syndicate an RSS feed in PHP, if you’re interested in learning how to do that.

Use Rel=’nofollow’ In the Links

If you do syndicate an RSS feed and reproduce it on each of your pages, you may want to consider using rel=’nofollow’ for the links.

Each of those links is an external link. Without the nofollow tag, you’d be bleeding a lot of pagerank from each of your pages. In the long run, this could be detrimental to your site – and it would probably outweigh any benefits from using the RSS feed in the first place.

You can fix this problem by placing the attribute rel=’nofollow’ in each of the links you create from the RSS feed.

If your website is a Wordpress blog, you’ll need to manually do this. Wordpress comes with a great built-in RSS Feed Widget – so you don’t have to manually parse the feed. However, it doesn’t give you an option to use ‘nofollow’ for the links.

You can read this guide to find out how to hack the Wordpress source to make the RSS Widget nofollow. You’ll need to know a bit of PHP, but it’s not too hard.

Remember: Don’t Steal Someone Else’s Copyrighted Work

Although articles are spread around the internet in RSS feeds, you still don’t own them.

It is acceptable to use an RSS feed to syndicate links back to the original source of an article. It would also be acceptable to include a short description of that link – based on the RSS feed it came from.

However, some users place entire articles in their RSS feeds. To reprint an entire article is copyright infringement. It is wrong, illegal, and could land you in a lot of trouble.

Use other people’s work fairly. It can add relevant links to your site – but try to steal whole articles.