Feed Updates on Yahoo!

Yahoo! lets users read RSS feeds directly on Yahoo! web pages (in My Yahoo! and elsewhere on Yahoo!). This means we can fetch your content once and update it simultaneously for all Yahoo! users. Yahoo! acts as a proxy for all our subscribers, lowering the bandwidth burden for content publishers like you.

Our self-scheduling software agent finds, categorizes, and periodically checks for updated RSS feeds (this is called "polling"). The agent adjusts the frequency of these checks based on a history of how often your content changes. Our "adaptive" polling ranges from every thirty minutes to no less than once a day, based on the frequency of updates. This helps ensure that your content updates efficiently, without wasting valuable bandwidth. Current refresh rates are established on a per-feed basis. Web sites that host content from multiple publishers may experience more traffic.

Pinging – to ensure that your latest post appears immediately, please notify us of your update (aka "ping"). You can do this manually by putting the following URL in the location bar of your browser with your RSS URL appended to it:

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[YOUR RSS URL]

Our system will then schedule an immediate refresh of your feed so Yahoo! has the most recent version. You can also do this programmatically by properly configuring your software. Our APIs currently support REST and XML-RPC. Click here for the APIs and examples.

Meaningful Titles and Descriptions

When your feed appears in search results, we display the title and description. By providing a meaningful and informative title and description, you increase the visibility and discoverability of your content. We recommend the following naming convention: "Provider: Sub-Topic."

For example, a specific feed from Reuters might be titled, "Reuters: Business." Using the same convention, a blog like Gizmodo can create sub-categories for various topics, such as "Gizmodo: Digital Cameras." However, your main feed does not need to have a "sub-topic" in the title.

In addition, please write a thoughtful, accurate, and descriptive summary for your feed. For example, you may want to include commonly known names for your site/publication (e.g., SFGATE and San Francisco Chronicle) as you can never predict how users will use search.

A Single, Stable URL for Your Feed

Because users subscribe to feeds by URL, it is important for publishers to decide on an RSS feed URL structure and then stick with it. Changing URLs results in a bad experience for existing subscribers. Your feed will stop updating - to keep reading they will have to resubscribe to your feed. Changing URLs also causes confusion for new subscribers by creating duplicate entries in our RSS database.

The Display Order of Your Feed

Most publishers display content in reverse chronological order (most recent first), but some choose to exercise editorial control within feeds by marking certain key stories as more important and prioritizing those. Currently, My Yahoo! respects the display order of your RSS feed and not the "pubdate."

The Yahoo! RSS Directory

When users click the   link on My Yahoo!, they can add RSS feeds in two ways:

• by searching the entire Yahoo! RSS database to find content, or

• by browsing a subset of the Yahoo! RSS database arranged by category - the Browse-by-Topic Directory.

If you submitted your RSS feed URL to the Yahoo! database (using the form field above), your feed is already accessible to Yahoo! users through the database.

Once your feed is in the database you can suggest it for inclusion in the Browse-by-Topic Directory. RSS feeds are hand-picked and categorized by Yahoo! editors, the same people who build the Yahoo! Web Directory.

Our RSS directory is well-organized, easy to use, intuitive, helpful, and balanced. To date, we've categorized thousands of the most popular blogs and web sites with RSS feeds. All submissions to our growing directory are reviewed by the editorial staff.

If you would like to suggest your RSS feed for inclusion in this directory, please use this form.

Note: The RSS directory does not include every feed that is submitted. We reserve the right to choose. We reserve the right to edit all titles and descriptions.

Media RSS Specification

Use Media RSS to distribute your multimedia content such as audio files (podcasting), images, and digital video. "Media RSS" is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilties of RSS 2.0. Learn more about Media RSS, and submit your multimedia feeds to Yahoo! Video Search.