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Why to not noindex your feed
I notice people talking about reasons to noindex your feed and thought I would chime in with my disagreement. If you are an index junky like myself you might have noticed that your RSS feed sometimes appears in Google instead of the actual page or post (as you see in the following image below):
An RSS feed can appear days before the actual page shows up in Google’s index. This is nothing to worry about because the googlebot grabbed for something to ID as quick as it could to determine the originator of content. If you watch closely, (and have enough pagerank/trust) after 3 (or sometimes more) days your RSS information disappears and is replaced by the actual page or post.
If you also look at this Boing Boing example (below) you see an archive AND feedburner URL. Wouldn’t it be nice to hold to top three positions for a few days even if it was for a homepage, archive and feed, in that order? This is good reason to monetize your feed and archive. :)
I link my feed in my footer and it currently has a pagerank of 5, it works well in getting my content crawled, indexed AND stamped with ownership if you know what I mean.
Noindexing a feed might also be dangerous, feeds have a purpose, let Google sort it out, well, it looks like they already have but I am open to further information on this if you got it, thanks.
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January 29th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Aaron, doesn’t this bring up the issue of duplicate content with Google? Showing 2 url’s with the same content on each?
Seems when I dont add the rss feed in my robots.txt I’m ok for a while but then go supplemental in MANY pages. As soon as I add the entry:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Then I come out of supplemental within a few days.
January 29th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Ken - This used to be the case not long ago but I am seeing Google getting it correct on my other blogs. Want me to put the Wordpress calendar back and see what happens? That used to be a duplicate content nightmare.
Note: I also went supplemental and I didn’t even have categories showing until recently. I pretty much removed all duplicate paths and still fell into it.
If multiple paths to content all come from the same URL wouldn’t Google by now have a way to figure it out? Look at Matt Cutts blog and others, they are default wordpress templates with calendar and categories linked sitewide in the sidebar (duplicates). If Google was getting it wrong that means 99% of wordpress blogs should be in supplementals because very few know how to remove duplicate paths right?
Again, SEO is not an exact science and I can only tell what I observe, my gut tells me Google is much smarter than me so getting Wordpress blogs right would be in their best interest.
More: Notice how Google can handle those who duplicate content with aggregators? Even if you have a new blog with little PR you eventually come out as the owner of your content right?
Don’t forget to set your preferred domain: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/setting-preferred-domain.html
And blah blah and blah. =P
Update: Andy makes a good point here.
January 29th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Yea man, basically that’s what I did. Looked at Matt’s blog and copied atleast how he setup his blog and feed. I’m also using Feedburner for the stats and email list but have all the features that he runs.
I DARE YOU to turn on that ugly calendar that was all the rage 2 years ago. haha
I also find that my feed gets indexed a few days before the original articles too. Nice little hack there.
April 20th, 2007 at 3:38 am
It seems Google and Yahoo! now both support noindex for RSS feeds, no confirmation yet about nofollow though…
April 20th, 2007 at 3:38 am
Cough… not nofollow, I meant “index, follow”
January 7th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
The problem has been solved:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html