Content Syndication Comparison: PushHub vs. RSS

RSS (often dubbed Really Simple Syndication) is a well established publication protocol that has been around for a while. In modern CMSs, turning on any section of a website into an RSS feed is fairly trivial. Once RSS feed is enabled, any other website can subscribe to the feed and start displaying the shared content. Clicking any link will send users to the source content.

While RSS is easy to turn on and interact with, it does come with limitations with regards to sophisticated content integration.

For starters, you may not want all items from a feed. Some content may not apply to you or may even be plain unwanted. Yet, RSS doesn't give the recipient site the ability to select which piece(s) of content from the feed to display. By contrast, the PushHub syndication mechanism developed by Six Feet Up gives you entire control about which specific item(s) to feature on your site.

Then you may want to display specific content items that contain time-sensitive information. You will want the content updated as soon as it's revised, usually for regulatory or marketing reasons. However, RSS based syndication only pulls content on a scheduled basis (usually hourly or daily). Sure, this frequency could be upped but then you might run into performance issues if the RSS client pings the source server too often. Fortunately, PushHub syndication is virtually immediate and comes with no performance tax as the hub simply notifies subscribing webpages when, and only when, changes are available.

Furthermore, you may want to empower site visitors to search and find shared content on your site. Unfortunately, RSS typically doesn't offer this feature since it caches the content from the original source website for a period of time and doesn't treat it like first class content on your site. On the other hand, you can share full web pages with PushHub with the shared content living on your site, which means your built-in search engine will be able to index and retrieve it.

Last, but not least, you may be interested in featuring content from a variety of websites. With RSS, you'll need to manually set up each website feed you want to feature, one at a time. This can be pretty time-consuming and may look somewhat disjointed. By contrast, PushHub lets you search and hand-pick content across a vast repository of syndicated data shared from various websites. Setting up a sidebar with syndicated content focused on a specific topic is now a breeze.

So, here's a quick recap of how PushHub differs from RSS:

Learn More:

Visit our PushHub page and read a case study or Schedule a discussion with our Director of Client Services Carol Ganz today.