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Debbie626

: My thoughts from an ecom+blog perspective: You do not need the button itself unless you want to offer something for a user using their eyes, without any helper tools alerting that RSS is

@Debbie626

My thoughts from an ecom+blog perspective: You do not need the button itself unless you want to offer something for a user using their eyes, without any helper tools alerting that RSS is available, to click into the feed.

IMO the preferred way to alert automation/tools/reader-plugins that a feed is available is to use rel="alternate" link in the <head> metas. This is helpful for both users as well as SEO in some circumstances.

So the feed route would look like this in <head>: <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Products On Sale Feed (Atom 1.0)" href="https://www.example.com/rss/onsale" />

In addition you can put a similar meta link in each category/archive/whatever listing just the entities within that scope: <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="A category feed (Atom 1.0)" href="https://www.example.com/rss/a-category"/>

It seems like all the helpful automation still finds it no problem, and constantly comes back to check for new content. Our logs are constantly filled with all the search bots (and others not-Google) hitting those feeds. Compared with the sitemap, there are about 4x as much interest in various feeds, especially on sale and latest content. As far as humans go, we have yet to have even 1 single person click the RSS button out of hundreds of thousands of visits to that area below the fold.

PS: Our #3 session affinity group is "technophiles" so it's not like they are unsure what RSS means.

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