A web feed is a data format used for giving users frequently updated content. As a content creator you can syndicate your content or subscribe to syndicated content from other popular content sites. Examples of syndicated content include Google news, most new articles or other web 2.0 enabled site (including yours).

Syndication benefits both the websites providing information and the websites displaying it. For the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to its pages, making it more attractive to users. For the transmitting site, syndication drives exposure across numerous online platforms. This generates new traffic for the transmitting site.

Web feeds have grown in popularity over emails because of the below benefits:

• When subscribing to a feed, users do not disclose their email address, so users are not increasing their exposure to threats associated with email.
• If users want to stop receiving news, they do not have to send an "unsubscribe" request; users can simply remove the feed from their news reader program.
• The feed items are automatically "sorted" in the sense that each feed URL has its own sets of entries (unlike an email box, where all mails are in one big pile and email programs have to resort to complicated rules and pattern matching).

By adding syndicated content to your site you get the benefit of some dynamic up-to-date content on your site while you add content to your site. Be sure to update your cron job scheduler frequency to match the syndicated content retrieval thresholds. You can find many sources of syndicated content from Google or other sites you trust.

Resources

Sources for syndicatedcontent

Video

In this video you will see how to enable web feeds.