Bidirectional linking refers to the linking of your podcast homepage to your podcast via your RSS feed. This feature is predominantly used by Google Podcasts and is a requirement for your podcast to be hosted on their service. The Timbre player has the requirements for bidirectional linking set by default and can be used for this purpose.
Why is bidirectional linking necessary?
Bidirectional linking will allow your podcast to be better indexed in Google search engines, a benefit of this is that Google will display a short description of your podcast and provide a carousel of episodes on the search results page when your podcast title is used.
Bidirectional linking is also a requirement for your podcast to be hosted on Google Podcasts.
How to set up bidirectional linking in Timbre.
When creating a podcast in Timbre, in the Discovery section you will find the Homepage URL field. If this field is left unpopulated, your Timbre feed URL will be used. In this field, you can also enter the URL for your custom podcast website. Your Timbre feed URL already has the necessary fields in your RSS feed filled. If you are using a custom podcast homepage, you must ensure that the name of your podcast is included in the title of your website. How to do this will be shown in the next section.
If you would like to change the homepage of an existing podcast, you can simply navigate to the Settings tab when managing your podcast and scroll down to the Discovery section where you will find Homepage URL. Here you can insert your custom podcast website URL.
How to implement bidirectional linking for your custom podcast website.
In order to fit the requirements for implementing bidirectional linking you must edit your website HTML to point to your RSS feed by adding the following tag in the <head> section:
<link type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate" title="Title_Value" href="RSS_URL"/>
In the above code, Title_Value refers to the title of your podcast.
The RSS_URL can be retrieved by navigating to your podcast and selecting the Share button from where you can simply click on RSS Link to have it copied to your clipboard.
If you would like to read more on implementing bidirectional linking for Google Podcasts you can visit Google's Create a show homepage and link it to your feed.