What's in a podcast feed
A podcast RSS feed is a single file your host keeps up to date. Apple Podcasts, Spotify and every other app read it to learn about your show. It holds one block of information per episode, and each block has the same fields.
ShowHub reads the same file. Here's where each field ends up:
| In your feed | On the page |
|---|---|
<title> | The page heading, the browser tab title and the end of the URL |
<content:encoded> or <description> | The show notes, as plain text |
<itunes:image> | The episode artwork, and the preview image when the page is shared |
<pubDate> | The date on the page and the order on your home page |
<enclosure> | The audio the player streams |
<guid> | Nothing visible. ShowHub uses it to know which page belongs to which episode |
<itunes:duration> | The running time shown under the title |
So the page is only as good as what's in the feed. That's usually good news: you already write titles and show notes for the apps, and now that work also builds your website.
Why not an RSS widget?
There are plenty of free widgets and WordPress plugins that "display an RSS feed". Most of them show a list of episode titles with a player, all on one page.
That's a list, not a set of pages. One page with 200 titles on it can't rank for 200 different topics. And many widgets load the list with JavaScript after the page opens, which means the episode text may not be in the HTML that search engines read first.
ShowHub builds a separate page for each item, rendered on the server, with its own title tag, description, share image and PodcastEpisode structured data. That's the version search engines can work with.
Feed problems that make pages look bad
If a page looks thin, the cause is almost always in the feed. The common ones:
- One-line descriptions. Some hosts have a short "summary" field and a long "notes" field. Make sure your show notes go into the long one.
- No episode artwork. Without it, pages fall back to your show's cover. That's fine, but episode art makes shared links stand out.
- Changed GUIDs. If your host regenerated episode IDs (it happens during some host migrations), apps and ShowHub may see old episodes as new ones. Avoid changing GUIDs after publishing.
- Private or region-locked feeds. ShowHub needs to be able to open the feed the same way a podcast app does.
Changing podcast hosts later
When you move hosts, the new host gives you a new feed URL and redirects the old one. Update the feed URL in ShowHub under Settings → Connectors. As long as your episode GUIDs came across unchanged, which most migration tools preserve, your pages stay where they are with the same addresses.