A long time ago, on myITforum.com, we pulled in RSS feeds from other places (like the TechNet and MSDN blogs). Community Server (the app we use for the blogs) allows you to do that. It was a neat concept in that you get a central feed for a lot of information along with the information our bloggers provide. We turned it off eventually because there were performance issues with Community Server when enabling that feature.
So, I've noticed recently, that other Community Server-based sites are still doing this, and I wondered why, primarily because it would be cool to start it up again. But, why weren't they seeing the performance problems that affected us?
After a bit of research, apparently, if you don't see a performance issue with that feature, you just aren't getting the kind of traffic to notice. myITforum.com sees too much traffic and bandwidth usage to warrant turning it back on -- at least with the current version of Community Server we are using. Maybe, once we upgrade to the 2008 version that was released not so long ago, the code will have been fixed. I don't know.
Still...we did it way back when as a way to expose great information, when RSS feed technology was in it's infancy. These days everyone has a RSS reader (well, except for maybe, Ed). With RSS readers being so common these days, and sites dedicated to finding RSS feeds are available, it may not be a viable solution anyway.
BUT -- after a bit more research, I found that pulling in the feeds actually does two things:
- It increases your Search Engine (Google and Live) value, so that your site links show up closer to the top in searches, and...
- It pads your stats -- making the site appear to have more traffic than it really does. How? Well, improving your Search Engine relevance definitely helps, but more importantly, pulling in multiple feeds, simulates more traffic (bandwidth and connections) to your site.
While, I'm not really inclined to turn it back on due to the second point (it just doesn't feel right doing it for that reason), it does make sense to turn it on to increase our site rankings in Google and Live.
What do you think? Would you like a central feed for all of your feeds? We could do it, we just have to weigh the costs and benefits. Let us know if this is something that would provide value to you.