HubPages offers RSS feeds to list your newest hubs, best hubs, and hottest hubs. Distributing your RSS feed and posting it on a related web site is excellent for traffic and ranking. However, we all write on so many different topics that the effectiveness of these feeds is limited.

Readers of my money saving blog could care less about hermit crab care. This article presents a brand new, super simple way to make your hubs on certain topics distributable via topic-based RSS feeds.

In this article...

Why use RSS for HubPages? • How to create RSS feeds for hot/best/latest hubs with a particular tag • How to make RSS feeds for your hubs, images, forum posts, and other HubPages contributions • Promote your hub with RSS

Let's say you've written a collection of hubs about the health benefits of essential oils. However, in your day job as a taxi driver you have learned all the shortcuts in your city so you also write local hubs.

You can promote your hubs on a natural remedies forum or web site (possibly your own blog) where people who would be interested in your essential oil knowledge. If the web site allows you to post an RSS feed, you can ensure that there are always links coming into your latest, hottest, or best hubs. In addition to being interesting to the users of the web site, search engines like Google will reward your hub with a better search ranking for having incoming links from web sites featuring content which is relevant to your hub. For more reasons why you should use RSS to promote your hub, read these helpful articles from other hubbers.

Unfortunately, since all of your hubs are included in the RSS feed, regardless of content, those traffic tips continually get in the way, a black sheep among your essential oil hubs. The solution is to publish RSS feeds which are filtered by topic to keep your readers' interest.

Once you have published 20 hubs on HubPages, a Top Tags module is added to your author page. The author page is the page that you reach after clicking the more → link on your profile and is probably the most commonly-used RSS feed for hub promotion. However, as you have already read, promoting hubs across many topics may not be very effective.

Clicking one of the tag links in the Top Tags module brings you to a page which shows only your hubs that are labeled with that particular tag. This is an excellent reason to include an identical tag among your hubs by category, so that you can easily distinguish them by topic and distribute only relevant articles in your RSS feeds.

Simply click the orange RSS icon in your browser toolbar or add ?rss to the end of the web address to get the link to your hub feed. This link can be used in any feed reader or feed submission system to pull in content from and links to your most recent, hottest, and best hubs.

For authors who do not have a Top Tags module

Even if your Top Tags are not listed on your author page, you can still generate RSS feeds based on the tags that you have applied to your hubs. Just follow these simple instructions to change the web address of your author page in order to view hubs by tag.

• Go to your author page: http://hubpages.com/author/YourUsername/latest/
• After your username but before the latest, hot, or best options, type one of the tags that you used, ensure that forward slashes separate these items: http://hubpages.com/author/YourUsername/your tag/latest/
• Hit the Enter key to visit the page, you can click Hot to sort your hubs with the hottest first: http://hubpages.com/author/YourUsername/your tag/hot/
• Add ?rss to the end of the web address to get the RSS feed for these results: http://hubpages.com/author/YourUsername/your tag/hot/?rss

Limitations of HubPages Hot, Latest, and Best Hubs RSS

• It is not possible to combine tags which may be problematic depending on how you plan to distribute your RSS feed. If you want to include multiple topics in the same feed, simply use the HubPages user content search to build advanced RSS feeds for your hubs.
• These feeds can only be used for hubs, but you can also get RSS for other HubPages content like images and video.
  

You can wrap up any hubs, polls, forum posts, or any other content that you've posted on HubPages into an RSS feed which can be used to promote your activity at HubPages. Unlike the tag-based RSS feeds described above, these feeds can span multiple content types and keywords.

Finding links to your categorized RSS feeds

The new search box on your HubPages user profile will take you to the HubPages user content search system. From this search, there are two ways to build feeds of your content.

1. If you use the search box on your profile you will see all results from your content based on the keywords that you selected. Your web browser should detect the RSS feed related to these lists and display an orange RSS icon in the web address bar or elsewhere. Click this to get the link to your topic-based RSS, or simply add &rss to the end of the search URL.
2. Just change the RSS link for any HubPages search to include your username: http://hubpages.com/search/saving+money?user=YourUsername&rss

Note: HubPages has added the convenience that both ?user=YourUsername&rss and ?rss&user=YourUsername will work. Unlike other pages, you cannot add ?rss to the end of the link because the link will not work properly with two question marks, so an ampersand is the required separator.

RSS feeds including only hubs, comments, polls, forum posts, etc

To the right of the search results, just click the name of the type of content that you wish to include in the RSS feed.

http://hubpages.com/search/include:images+stock+photo?user=YourUsername&rss

Note: If you only intend to include hubs in the RSS which match a specific tag, use the author page to generate your RSS XML instead because that RSS link is cleaner and this method searches full text instead of just tags.

HubPages RSS with multiple, specific types of content

You can then include multiple content types by modifying the URL as follows to include a comma-separated list of each content type that you wish to include in the results with no spaces between each item. This helps to exclude content which you may not want to syndicate, such as forum posts and questions:

http://hubpages.com/search/include:hubs,polls,images+stock+photo?user=YourUsername&rss

Note: Be careful to not remove the + sign which separates the content types from the keyword search. Also, if there are any spaces between the content types, they will be included as keywords in the search.

Limitations of using the HubPages user content search for RSS

• The RSS links are not as clean as the links to RSS for your hot/best/latest hubs
• Results can be sorted by date or by relevance, which is loosely related to latest and best but the relevance of the hub to the particular search keyword overrides the hubscore to some extent.
  
• You cannot search only on tags, so any of your content containing matching text will be listed.