"Submit your RSS feed for instant backlinks and higher rankings" was a genuinely common piece of SEO advice for years. It was never quite true in the way it was sold, and it's even less true today — search engines don't treat having an RSS feed as a ranking signal, and the old ecosystem of RSS directories that advice depended on has mostly disappeared entirely.
Why the Old Advice Never Really Held Up
The theory was that submitting your feed to RSS directories generated backlinks and helped search engines discover new content faster. In practice, most of those directories were low-quality, and any minor discovery benefit had nothing to do with RSS itself — search engines discover new pages through normal crawling, sitemaps, and links, with or without a feed involved at all.
What actually helps discovery and rankings today includes:
- A properly submitted XML sitemap, which is the modern, legitimate equivalent of "helping search engines find new content"
- Genuine internal linking from your existing pages to new content
- Real external links from other sites, earned through genuinely valuable content
- Consistent publishing that builds a track record of a site being actively maintained
A Simple Framework
- Stop treating RSS feed submission as an SEO tactic — it isn't one
- Submit a proper XML sitemap through search engine tools instead
- Focus on internal linking from existing strong pages to new content
- Invest effort in genuine content quality and outreach rather than feed directory submissions
> Tip: If a piece of advice suggests submitting your RSS feed to dozens of directories will meaningfully help your rankings, it's advice from an era before that ecosystem became mostly defunct — don't spend time on it today.
Example
Before: A site owner spending hours submitting their RSS feed to dozens of low-quality RSS directories, expecting a meaningful ranking boost.
After: The same time spent submitting a proper XML sitemap and building genuine internal links to new content — the actual mechanisms search engines rely on for discovery today.
Common Mistakes
- Believing RSS feed submission directly influences search rankings
- Spending time on RSS directory submissions instead of legitimate discovery mechanisms
- Confusing "having a feed" with "being discoverable," which are unrelated today
- Ignoring XML sitemaps, the actual modern tool for helping search engines find new content
If you haven't set one up, submitting a proper sitemap is the legitimate modern step this old advice was gesturing toward. SeoWolf's XML Sitemap Generator is the right tool for that job.
RSS never had the SEO power it was sold as having — the sitemap quietly took over the job the feed was never actually doing.