Add RSS - Website Directory and RSS News 2020

The RSS guidelines that we have outlined below have been formulated to guarantee the delivery of an honest and high-quality reading experience for our readership. By following each step outlined below, we can ensure that your content and comments are delivered to our platform promptly. Each suggestion that we have put forward follows open Internet standards and best-practices protocol. If content performs well on Crowdinthebox will inevitably perform on the World Wide Web in general.

Please follow our recommendations below so any content delivered by you to our RSS feed is presented optimally.

RSS Guidelines

Crowdinthebox will utilize the RSS Feed on your website to discover relevant industry-specific content and will create a summary of the content to be presented on our RSS feed. Nearly all types of RSS feeds should work in sync with the Crowdinthebox RSS feed. All that being said, we suggest you follow these best practices to make sure that the summary of your content picked up and processed by our content analyzation system is accurate, looks presentable, and sends out the intended message it was originally created for.

Optimizing your RSS feed for Crowdinthebox:

Ensure that your website’s RSS feed includes the below-listed fields:

At the channel level, include:

<title> your RSS feed’s name
<link> the URL of your RSS feed
<description> a sentence explaining to the reader the content your feed covers
<language> your RSS feed’s language – note you should use ISO-639 language codes as well as ISO-3166 country codes – for instance: “en“, “en-CA“, and “fr-CA”

For every item on your feed, the information in the list below will need to be included:

<title> title as well as where HTML characters should be encoded
<link> Content URL. Try to ensure the host domain matches the RSS feed’s domain
<description> a small description that is 300+ characters. Make this a catchy and informative

the excerpt explains the content accurately.

<pubDate> include the date of when the content piece was created – note that this must comply with both the RFC822 standard or ISO 8601 format and should include the time zone.
<guid>this must be a unique id for the specific content entered into the RSS feed. (Note that you may use the item URL).
<dc:creator> include the article’s author.
<enclosure> this is a tag used to include any media elements used in the RSS feed’s layout view to illustrate the content. You can include a video or an image. Try to use mp4 format for video as this is mobile compatible. In the case of images, use high-resolution while try to make sure that the dimension of the image is no less than 500px.
<category> this is not required but you can include it to specifically describe the content’s main topic

As an added suggestion, your RSS feed should have at least 20 entries displaying recent items from your website.

Best Practices

Your RSS feed should clearly follow W3C specifications
Please ensure there is no password needed to view your RSS Feed
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
Please try your best to avoid using redirects or article URLs
Your feed will need to be in date order with the most recent content starting from the top. Any content that older than 90 days will not be included
Use different images for all of your articles. If you use the same picture for all articles, your other articles will not have an image displayed as we do not display the same image multiple times

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

If your website uses (via <link rel=”amphtml”>), then our RSS Feed will pick up this version of the page for the simple reason that AMP articles gain more traction and tend to enhance user experience. If this is your aim, then please make sure that you have referenced all of your AMP pages in your HTML and that they are fully complete. In some cases, your blog platform may already auto-generate these AMP pages and so there is nothing for you to do, but you will need to are this in mind when you are checking your traffic stats on Crowdinthebox.

Outdated Feeds

If your feed has not been updated for around 6 months, then it will likely be automatically removed. This is to ensure the quality of our feeds and to make sure our readership has access to the latest up to date information. If you would like your feed to remain, you can resubmit your feed.

RSS Feed Troubleshooting

What happens you receive an error message when adding your feed to a magazine?

Check that you are using the correct URL for the feed and also ensure you have not added any extra spaces after or before the URL.
Check your feed is working on an internet browser. Also, check to make sure that there are no broken links or any missing links.
Check your robots.txt file. You will need to ensure that the robots.txt file is not blocking “Crowdinthebox” or “Crowdinthebox Proxy”.

What happens if the latest stories are not displaying in your Crowdinthebox RSS Feed?

You may need to wait up to 12 hours before the Crowdinthebox feed updates to include your content
Ensure that your RSS feeds have new content. If the content in your RSS Feed is not new, then it will not be picked up and displayed.
Make sure that your RSS feed is set to display your content in chronological order with the newest/most recent article first.
If your content was published more than 90 days ago, then it will not be picked up and added to the Crowdinthebox feed.