Comments on: Why to not noindex your feed

By: Pascal Van Hecke

Pascal Van Hecke — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:36:41 +0000

The problem has been solved:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html

By: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:38:34 +0000

Cough… not nofollow, I meant “index, follow”

By: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:38:03 +0000

It seems Google and Yahoo! now both support noindex for RSS feeds, no confirmation yet about nofollow though…

By: Ken Savage

Ken Savage — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:45:11 +0000

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.

By: Aaron Pratt

Aaron Pratt — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:38:41 +0000

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.

By: Ken Savage

Ken Savage — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:11:56 +0000

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.