Well the net has been all over this topic in the last few days. Interesting development but what does it mean to the marketer, entrepreneur? Lot’s of opinons on that all over too and at the moment I have none. However it it does bring two things to mind.

1. Google uses RSS feeds to build it’s blog search database. So, get your feeds up – this has been stressed in my last AutoDiscovery article and while they are two different things. It does go to show that RSS is getting more and more important. I don’t want to bore you with technicalities and neither should you have to worry about it too much. But just you know, RSS is important not because it’s RSS but because of it’s structure. The coding used to create RSS feeds make it easy for people (like search engines) to create applications that can easily tap into information from anyone and anywhere. Eventually, there’ll be more applications online and web based will use RSS to feed them information, the turn around distribute it and I’m not talking search engines only. So… get your feeds up.
2. Ping your blog. Ping, Ping, Ping. In the 4 part Blogging seminar I held last month with Kelly McCausey, this was stressed over and over. And I’ll stress that again. But please don’t just ping for the sake of it and there’s no need to ping more than once!

In researching about this topic and using the brand new Google Search I also came accross this post by Susan Getgood. She has lots and lots of good questions for example:

Question one: Are these blog search engines or RSS search engines? They are not synonymous. Most, probably all blogs provide an RSS feed, but not all RSS feeds are blogs.

Good one. If you read Google Search’s FAQ’s, they say (for now)

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.

While it’s true not all RSS feeds come from blogs, not all RSS feeds are pinged either. From the FAQ’s, I take it that they automatically pick the blogs up if they have a feed and ping the update services. So if you have an RSS feed for your regular website and don’t ping, they won’t pick it up. Chances are, blogs will be the ones that get picked up. But it is still a good question because once they introduce the manual submission then the pool of real blogs will be diluted. I also see a lot of apprehension that these searches will be used for spam purposes as we’ve seen in several blog and RSS directories. I think it is a cycle.

Yes, people will use it to spam but with time these directories and search engines will find a way to weed them out or change whatever they need to so they return the best most accurate results. If you’re a blogger for your business, just keep blogging good information, work with these people and don’t only rely on blogs or rss as your sole traffic generator. Any thoughts?