RSS Feeds for SEO benefits?

[Farmer77]

I came upon this article that talks about a google patent and to make a long story short, they believe that having RSS Newsfeeds on a static website will help it rank better or at least maintain it's ranking. It makes the search engines believe you're consistantly refreshing website content.

I'm very interested in this because I'm building a content website which is all static webpages and I'll maybe update the frontpage once a month if at all. If I do incorporate a RSS Newsfeed into the site, I'll probably put it near the bottom of the page to keep visitors on my site instead of having them click out to read the whole article elsewhere.

I haven't seen much static websites doing this, so maybe this whole RSS Feed/SEO thing is just a whole bunch of baloney?

I would like to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

[Chris]

Frequently updated content has nothing to do with ranking well, only with being crawled more often. I have sites that easily rank at #1 and they haven't had a content update in years.

But including an RSS feed of your content is often a good idea as it encourages repeat visitors to stay on top of your content and come back every once in awhile.

Actually after reading that article it appears the guy is misinterpreting the patent. They're saying an increase in the rate of change. Meaning if a site changes daily normally, than changing hourly could give a temporary boost, but if a site normally changes yearly then changing monthly could give a boost.

And in anycase, in addition to all the evidence that frequently updated content is not necessary to rank well, there of course the fact that just because Google has a patent in something, doesn't mean that something is implemented. Companies patent every idea they have whether they plan to use it or not, or any idea they might a competitor might have and try to use.