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Avatar Went Hot: December 18, 2007 - 9:22 am
Posted By: Sebastian 255 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://sebastians-pamphlets.com)
Category: Google SEO
Google removes XML feeds from Web search results. So unless Google provides a procedure to prevent feeds from accumulating PageRank whilst allowing access for blog search crawlers that request feeds (I believe something like that is in the works), it's still a good idea to nofollow all feed links, but there's absolutely no reason to block them in robots.txt any more.
10 Comments     

Comments

from dannysullivan 255 days ago #
Votes: 1 | Vote:
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Pretty sure Matt said a few months ago that this was already happening -- I think the German side is playing catchup.

from mvandemar 255 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Gbot does follow links within the XML feeds though, as far as I know, as does Yahoo, so I'm not sure what the impact of nofollowing the links to the feed would have.

from Sebastian 255 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Thanks Danny. I didn't find that quote, also I could swear that not long ago I've seen feeds on Web SERPs. Of course looking for XML feeds today I wasn't able to catch one of those. However, I think Google should extract the URL of the HTML page and display this one when a feed lands in a raw result set.

from Sebastian 255 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Michael, if the blog is well structured, the answer is "None".

from mvandemar 255 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Well, I have a site that has a news feed on it. It has quite a few subscribers from what I can tell. Google and Yahoo both hit that feed every couple of hours... whereas they will hit the main page of the news section (the only other place linking to the internal stories) every few days. They both follow all of the links inside the feed (it is rss, btw). I'm just not sure I would really want to alter that behavior.

The feed doesn't ping anyone, although of course it might be getting pinged by some other service. I just always assumed it was due to all the subscribers that it got as much attention as it does.

from Sebastian 255 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Feedfetcher and similar Yahoo bots grab your feeds not caring about any blocks coz they act on behalf of humans, and the contents they fetch don't land in Web search indexing queues (but of ocurse in other places, for example GoogleReader's searchable index). Googlebot, Slurp, msnbot and even ask accept RSS feeds as sitemaps, you can submit those for crawling purposes. Blog SE crawlers extract the feed URLs from the HEAD section, and get them from ping services on updates. Anyway, neither the PageRank of XML feeds nor the value of REL attributes in links pointing to them should play a role for indexing.

from mvandemar 255 days ago #
Votes: 1 | Vote:
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neither the PageRank of XML feeds nor the value of REL attributes in links pointing to them should play a role for indexing


Well, true... but should is a funny word when applied to Google, you know that. :D

from Sebastian 255 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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As for Google that's "doesn't". As for (all) other Web services "shouldn't" suffices. ;)

from g1smd 255 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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They should still fetch the feeds and follow the links within them.

The feed URLs should not show up in the SERPs for website results.

I wouldn't object if there was a separate set of SERPs that listed only feeds.

from Sebastian 255 days ago #
Votes: 3 | Vote:
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Roughly 24 hours later Google posted the announcement on the US Webmaster blog:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html


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