Many owners of commercial web sites believe that by incorporating newsfeeds on their sites they will improve their search engine rankings by using links appearing within those feeds, which are given relevance by Google. This belief is wrong because newsfeeds are basically JavaScript or VBScript.

These scripts must be executed by search engine spiders for fresh content to be noted, and since spiders take a simplistic approach when reading web pages, these scripts will not be executed at all. These scripts are compiled 'after' they have been served, and not before.

There are also a couple of growing menaces associated with RSS newsfeeds:

o Since popularity of RSS use is growing exponentially, idea to monetize syndication with ads is gaining ground. Indeed, Yahoo has announced that it will begin displaying ads from Overture's service within RSS feeds. Now who wants other people's ads on their web site? I don't.

o There are rumors of newsfeeds being used to deliver spam. If this gets out of control then newsfeeds will quickly become history. Who wants spam messages appearing on their web site? I don't. RSS is therefore not a global solution to fresh content problem.

4) Newsfeed Scripting Solutions: A software solution can be rigged up to 'extract' HTML from newsfeeds. The HTML is then placed onto web pages so that fresh content will be seen by search engine spiders. This however involves use of PHP and MySQL, which tends to put many business owners owners off. And if there's spam or ads in feed, they will get extracted, too!

Newsfeed scripting solutions are therefore not a global solution to fresh content problem.

5) Creating Original: Content As mentioned above under SSI's and Weblogs, creating and manually uploading your own fresh content every day is a time-consuming chore. And what if you have a number of web sites, each of which requires frequent fresh content in order to remain competitive? Yet we all know that there is nothing better than our own proper keyword-rich fresh content.

In summary, getting frequent proper fresh content onto our web sites is not straightforward at all. HTML extracted from RSS feeds appears to offer a partial solution, but it is too complicated for most businesses and is potentially menacing.

The e-commerce industry is clearly in need of a genuine solution to fresh content problem. The way to do it is to automatically have our web pages updated every day with 'our own' content, not anyone else's. Only then will we be able to say that fresh content is truly master!