Problems adding website rss feed to My MSN
Phew. Just spent the good part of an hour trying to add my website rss feed to My MSN and to be honest have failed miserably.
At this point you may be asking why am I trying to add my own website feed to a reader in my own MSN account? Well over the last month or so I have noticed that I have only received 2 visits from the MSNBot!!
Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp had visited many, many time in that period and so I was beginning to think what gives with MSN and why do they not seem to wish to visit and index my site.
So what could I do about trying to entice MSNBot and making it ’see my feeds’. Again from my own webmaster experience and from what I had read, it was suggested that adding your own feed to your own personal search engine web page could speed up the indexing process, hence the quest to add my websites rss feed to My MSN was started.
I already have an MSN account, so successfully logged in and then managed to find the button on the page that states ‘add content’. Once selected a pop up search text box appears and you are asked for the url of the feed you wish to ask.
On entering my feed url http://tomakemoneyonline/feed/ and pressing the green arrow button MSN sadly informed me that :-
There are currently no matches containing url:http://tomakemoneyonline.net/feed/
however syndicated content changes frequently and retrying this search later may produce better results.
It appears that if MSN does not know about your website feed i.e. then MSN search results cannot find your site feed, then there is no way to add it to my MSN (it has to find it to be able to add it).
I had already manually added my feed to Google and My Yahoo several weeks ago. Their processes were quick and simple without encountering any problems whatsoever.
So the MSN process seemed a bit of a catch 22 situation and so off I went to browse the internet and see if anyone else had found the same issue. Surprisingly I only found a small handful of queries that webmasters had posted in forums and only one had received a useful reply. Other users agreed that they too could not add their own website rss feeds and were lost for an explanation or fix. The one golden suggestion was to open a Windows Live account and add your websites rss feed to this!
Seemed simple enough, so off I went to this windows live site and within minutes I had opened an account (simple if you are already a hotmail or messenger customer). However quite quickly I became puzzled again. Where was the link to add my website rss feed? Looked high and low on the pages but no, could not see it anywhere.
So lets try the Windows Live search engine itself and look for the term ‘how to add rss feed to windows live’. Although no direct answer was found (why the hell is this so difficult?) I did manage to find a website that listed some code for putting an on page button to ‘add rss feed to windows live’. So I hovered over the button and captured the following code:-
’http://www.live.com/?add=http://www.tomakemoneyonline.net/feed/’
Entered the above directly into the browser and guess what? Yes it worked. Windows Live pulled back the last five entries from my blog and displayed them on the screen before asking me if I wanted to ‘add this feed to Live.com, to which I confirmed.
I was then taken into My Windows Live account and there was my beloved feed shown in a portal. Yes !!
Every post that I now make should be picked up by Microsoft MSN’s Windows Live and displayed on my account page. Bliss.
Then just to make things even better, I noticed that the individual listings of my posts on the Windows Live page had a ‘more’ hover hyperlink. The hover further showed further links of ‘read full story’, ’send to a friend’ and ‘blog this’. The first link is self-explanatory, the second one fires off an email (which I did) and the third ‘blog this’ is the most interesting.
On selecting the ‘blog this’ link you are requested to start a Windows Live Spaces blog obviously hosted by MSN. Not wishing to appear ungrateful I opened a new blog which appears to be a very close similarity to MySpace pages.
Consequently I am now the proud owner of a Windows Live Spaces blog called To Make Money Online. I have already added a couple of entries to my Live Spaces blog which link back to this main website.
Will I now get visited by the MSNBot ? Only time will tell. I’ll report back when I have an update.
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