RSS Guidelines
In this guide, you will find all the information you need to know about the Directory News RSS feeds in order to guarantee to our readers the delivery of trustworthy, truthful, and noteworthy content that is of the highest quality.
By following the procedures provided in our guidelines we are able to make sure your written work and media content, as well as all accompanying comments, are posted on the Directory News platform in a timely manner. All guidelines on this page are in accordance with ‘open internet standards’ as well as its best-practices. We believe that by following these guidelines your conent stands a better chance of going viral on Directory News, and as such it will also go viral across the World Wide Web.
Kindly follow these guidelines so you can be 100% sure that your content is delivered to our RSS feed fully optimized, mobile as well as desktop ready, and delivered to the intended target audiences.
RSS Guidelines
Directory News uses your website’s RSS feed to pick out the most recent news stories within your industry and/or specific industry sectors covered on your website’s RSS feed. Once the content has been earmarked for delivery onto our platform, our system will create a summary for the benefit of Directory Newsreaders.
Our platform will work with a large array of different types of RSS feeds so all you need to do is ensure that you have posted your content on your website according to the guidelines. This guarantees that your images will show up correctly, media is titled correctly, and summaries are an accurate account of the message you are trying to get across to those that are interested in reading about the subject(s)/topic(s) covered.
How To Optimize your RSS feed for Directory News:
To begin with, you will need to check that your RSS feed is using the fields mentioned in the following list:
The channel level of your RSS feed will need:
- <title> RSS feed name
- <link> this is the URL directing us to your RSS feed
- <description> a short one-sentence explanation of your RSS feed
- <language> language used on your RSS feed using code outlined by ISO-and ISO-3166. An example of this EN for English, and FR-CA for French Canadian.
Additional information will be needed for the below items:
- <title> title of your content with the inclusion of the location HTML characters will be encoded
- <link> URL link to the content. Make 100% sure the host matches RSS feed domain
- <description> A short description of the content (300+ characters) this could almost be a sales pitch as to why this content is important, the topic or issue it explains, solves, or covers
- <pubDate> publishing date of the content according to RFC822 standard or ISO 8601. (Also include the time zone)
- <guid> enter the content’s unique id for this item which can be the item’s URL if you so wish
- <dc: creator> give us the name of the author here
- <enclosure> any media such as video or images should be included in this tag. If you are using video, please try to use mp4 as this works best for mobile devices. As for images, these should at the very least 500px and high resolution
- <category> as an added extra, try to include the content’s topic. You can, in fact, leave this blank if you so wish.
One further point that is not strictly necessary, but we advise it – if possible try to make sure your RSS feed is full with at least 20 topics.
Directory News Recommended Best Practices
- Use RSS Feed W3C specifications
- Make sure your RSS feed is not password protected
- URLs should be presentable. i.e. not too long and use a specific structure. If you use social media, you should use the same URLs placed on these platforms
- Ensure all URLs are clean, readable, to a reasonable length, and follow a specific standard. Also, ensure you use the same URLs posted on your social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter
- We do not recommend using redirects as this could cause issues
- Your RSS feed will need to be sorted with the most recently posted content at the top
- Every content piece will need a different image as the Directory News platform will not be able to publish the same image multiple times
AMP – <link rel=”amphtml”>
Our system prioritizes pages that use the <link rel=”amphtml”> as part of Google Accelerated Pages. As a result, only this version will be picked up by our system. This is because mobile pages tend to outperform standard HTML pages. If you are using <link rel=”amphtml”>, please make sure all AMP pages have been fully and clearly referenced in the HTML code.
Feeds Not Updated For 6 Months
Feeds that have no updates or new content for 6 months are typically removed from Directory News so we can guarantee to our readers only the latest news topics are being covered.
RSS Feed Troubleshooting
The below list gives you guidance on how to deal with any issues that may arise when adding your RSS feed to the Directory News magazine:
- Double-check the URL is 100% correct, and that there are no spaces before or after the URL
- Open an internet browser and check if the feed can be displayed or for any broken links
- Make sure your robot.txt file is not disallowing Directory Feed access
- Check your feed is working on an internet browser. Also, check to make sure that there are no broken links or any missing links.
The following list is to trouble issues whereby your latest content is not showing up in your feed:
- Please note that if you have only just posted content, it could take 12 hours for or system to pick it up
- Check that the post dates are correct on your RSS feed and that your feed’s content is not older than 6 months (90 days)
- Double-check to make sure your RSS feed is displaying your content with the latest dates at the top and older content below – this must be in date order
