Troubleshoot an RSS feed

This article will walk you through best practices and troubleshooting steps for RSS Feeds and Google Alerts Feeds.

If you have control of the RSS Feed 

Currently, we use Feedly as our 'RSS Reader' to support RSS feeds 

If you experience any issues with the RSS Feed and/or related posts being published from that RSS Feed such as: 

• Incorrect image, text or link being picked up. 
• Posts not being picked up from the RSS feed. 

We highly recommend if you've set up or have control of the RSS feed that you check out this article about how you can optimize the RSS feed to improve compatibility with Feedly: 

https://blog.feedly.com/10-ways-to-optimize-your-feed-for-feedly/ 

We'd also recommend validating the RSS feed to ensure that it's compatible with all RSS feed readers and any issues are addressed. You can check any issues simply by pasting the RSS feed link into the following site: 

https://validator.w3.org/feed/ 

If, for example, you've set up the RSS feed for your WordPress site or similar using a plugin and you've been advised that there are issues with the RSS feed, we'd suggest looking for a different plugin as this may be more beneficial long term. 

Otherwise, please see below for further steps. 

If you don't have control of the RSS feed 

If you found an RSS feed outside of EOSocial or even as a recommendation when looking to add one in your EOSocial account but are unable to add it successfully due to an error or you find that: 

• The incorrect image, text or link being picked up. 
• Posts not being picked up from the RSS feed. 

Please take a few moments to pass the feed through a free application called FeedBurner provided by Google: 

https://feedburner.google.com/ 

This will optimise the RSS feed and usually addresses any issues with the RSS feed being added or with posts from the RSS feed including them being picked up successfully. 

Once you've passed the RSS feed through FeedBurner, please copy the new URL provided and add the RSS feed or update the existing RSS feed URL. 

If you've passed your RSS feed through FeedBurner, please contact us and outline include the URL for the RSS feed and the outstanding issues so that we can investigate further. 

Using Google Alerts as RSS Feeds

When you're adding an RSS Feed, you're also able to set up a Google Alerts Feed to use similarly to an RSS Feed. Google Alerts Feeds are essentially ongoing searches that will populate based on new search results for the keywords you provided when setting up the Google Alerts Feed. 

As a Google Alerts Feed is linked to a specific Google Account (the one selected when setting this up), we don't recommend trying to use the exact same Google Alerts Feed across multiple users, e.g., pasting in an existing Google Alerts Feed URL. 

Instead, you should set this up separately for different users using different Google Accounts as needed. 

Please also bear in mind that, in these cases, updates are purely based on when new search results are picked up and, as we only include results for both RSS Feeds and Google Alerts Feed from the last 30 days in all cases to ensure the content is fresh and relevant, you may find that updates are limited if your keywords are very specific.