Sorry this site requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser. See the following guide on How to enable JavaScript in Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Safari. Alternatively you may be blocking JavaScript with an advert-related or developer plugin. Please check your browser plugins.

Sphinn Home » SEO
Google terminates indexing of Atom/RSS feeds
SEO News Source: http://sebastians-pamphlets.com
Published: Dec 18, 2007 - 09:22 am
Story Found By: Sebastian 1982 Days ago
Category: 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.
 Comments10 Comments  

Comments

Avatar Administrator
from dannysullivan 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Pretty sure Matt said a few months ago that this was already happening -- I think the German side is playing catchup.

Avatar
from mvandemar 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

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.

Avatar Moderator
from Sebastian 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

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.

Avatar Moderator
from Sebastian 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Michael, if the blog is well structured, the answer is "None".

Avatar
from mvandemar 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

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.

Avatar Moderator
from Sebastian 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

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.

Avatar
from mvandemar 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 1

neither the PageRank of XML feeds nor the value of REL attributes in links pointing to them should play a role for indexingWell, true... but should is a funny word when applied to Google, you know that. :D

Avatar Moderator
from Sebastian 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

As for Google that’s "doesn’t". As for (all) other Web services "shouldn’t" suffices. ;)

Avatar
from g1smd 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 0

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.

Avatar Moderator
from Sebastian 1982 Days ago #
Votes: 3

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

Upcoming Conferences

Search Marketing ExpoSearch Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.


SMX Web Site » | SMX Difference » | SMX News »

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

Latest News From Marketing Land
Upcoming Webcasts

Digital Marketing Depot Learn more about search marketing with our free online webcasts and webinars from our sister site, Digital Marketing Depot. Upcoming online events include:


Webcasts:
Research:
Whitepapers:

See More Topics

Latest News From Search Engine Land