Blog RSS auto-backlinks on a GitHub repo

A tricky hack for adding backlinks to a GitHub repo.

#meta#projects#seo

Links to a site in a GitHub URL count as “nofollow” backlinks.

They aren’t the most effective, but if you can implement them, they might still be helpful1.

I’ve implemented a solution to link blog posts in a GitHub repo automatically using an RSS feed, as part of my domain ranking experiment for this site.

This GitHub Actions workflow can parse an RSS feed, and output a Markdown README.md file with a list of blog posts:

name: Update README with Blog Posts


on:
  schedule:
    # Run every hour
    - cron: '0 * * * *'
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
    paths:
      - '.github/workflows/*'  # Only run if workflow files change


jobs:
  update-readme:
    permissions:
      contents: write


    runs-on: ubuntu-latest


    steps:
    - name: Checkout repository
      uses: actions/checkout@v2


    - name: Install required packages
      run: |
        sudo apt-get update
        sudo apt-get install -y curl libxml2-utils


    - name: Fetch RSS feed
      id: fetch_rss
      run: |
        # CHANGE THIS TO YOUR FEED URL
        RSS_URL="https://YOURWEBSITE/feed"
        # This xpath definition may need to be changed to fit your feed structure
        curl -s "$RSS_URL" | xmllint --xpath '//item/title | //item/link' - | \
        awk 'NR % 2 == 1 { title=$0; gsub(/<[^>]+>/, "", title); } NR % 2 == 0 { gsub(/<[^>]+>/, "", $0); print "- [" title "](" $0 ")" }' > posts.md


    - name: Prepare Markdown content
      id: prepare_markdown
      run: |
        if [ -f posts.md ] && [ -s posts.md ]; then
          echo "# Latest Blog Posts" > new_content.md
          cat posts.md >> new_content.md
        else
          echo "# Latest Blog Posts" > new_content.md
          echo "No blog posts found." >> new_content.md
        fi


    - name: Update README.md
      run: |
        if [ -s new_content.md ]; then
          rm README.md
          mv new_content.md README.md
          rm posts.md
        fi


    - uses: stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action@v5
      with:
        commit_message: "Update README with latest blog posts"
        branch: main

See kristianfreeman/blog-posts for how this looks in practice. Right now, it will only show however many blog posts your RSS feed returns. Caching or a better lookup could be implemented.

Footnotes

  1. See this ahrefs article on nofollow links. The gist is that although they may not necessarily help page ranking, they can still have some benefits. ↩