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Jan
25
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Noindex, follow for RSS Feeds? |
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Guest post by Joost de Valk. Every now and then when you search, whether it be Google, MSN, or Yahoo — RSS feeds show up in the SERPs. For instance, if you search for the popular blog boing boing on Google, the third result is the FeedBurner feed of that particular blog. This, of course, is a "bug." Most of us don't want feeds listed in the SERPs. It does however, make you think:
I won’t go in to why search engines seems to be indexing feeds — fact is: they do. The feed for my personal blog has PageRank 4 at the moment, which goes to show that Google even assigns some weight to it. Now think about it, wouldn’t it be cool if you had the equivalent of a noindex, follow (not nofollow) robots meta tag for RSS feeds? That way, the feed could be followed, search engines could spider and assign weight to the links within, yet it wouldn’t show the contents of your feed in the SERPs. It would also allow controlling what gets excluded on a file-level without access to robots.txt — sometimes a problem at larger organizations and with multiple feeds at various URLs (WordPress, anyone?). These are some of the same reasons that were posited for the creation of the robots meta tag. This could, of course, be accomplished quite easily. For instance, PICS has been added to RSS 2.0 as an optional channel element. This basically means an extra element <rating> in the header of an RSS feed. Programs can use this rating to check if a user should be shown the content of this feed. You could also add a <robots> tag in the same fashion, which would then look something like this: <robots>noindex, follow</robots> This relatively simple addition to the protocol can — if the search engines agree to it, augment what you can do with RSS feeds from an search engine marketing perspective. At the same time, this will give webmasters an easy way to solve the problem of their feeds showing up in the search results. Related posts: Were You a Good Christian SEO This Year? Have you been a good Christian this year? No? So... Wildcard Robots.txt Matching Is Now (Almost) Standard By way of this post on Search Engine Roundtable, I... Adding Social Bookmarking Icons To News Feeds If you're using a newsreader, you may notice that I... 6 Questions To Weed Out Charlatan SEOs. Make Suggestions … There are a lot of idiots charlatans still out there... How You Can Stop Dirty Feed Scrapers In 3 Easy Steps Stealing is wrong; but some people just don't seem to...
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"21 Wise Comments Banged Out Somewhere On The Internet ..."
I disallow them with robots.txt or rel="nofollow".. I agree with you that's is really annoying to get feeds in SERPs
Isn't this a problem that is caused by a wrong configuration of the server? If you serve your RSS feeds with the mime-type "text/xml" Google can read them perfect. But if you serve them with the right mime-type "application/rss+xml" Google doesn't index it and RSS readers can deal with them perfectly. A robots element in the RSS feed is only a work-around, isn't it?
rxbbx: it sure is… having to block them sucks as well though, since they do have some weight, and people WILL link to your feed…
It's a good way to get yourself excluded from search.msn.com/feeds or don't u want to be up there ? i think the se's can easily fix this internally, let's submit a bug report
@Joost Regards
Both FeedBurner and other feeds in the SERPs result in another user-experience than you wanted to offer the people coming to your site from the SERPs, that's my main point… Blocking them would be foolish, as you would be throwing away perfect link equity.
If you don't use an outside RSS provider such as feedburner can't you just block the spider's the usual way via Robots.txt?
There's a "NoIndex" feature on feedburner under the publicize section…not sure if it also does NoFollow (which would be bad)…
Adam, do you have a link for the feedburner feature? Or, what I really want — does anyone know the syntax for adding the noindex element to a feed?
Hi John, I wrote a WordPress plugin for it, there's an explanation of the tag in the page for it on my site.
I've just been looking into this and I agree a noindex, follow command would be good but what about a simple method of performing a 301 [for robots only] from the feed location e.g. /feed/ say back to the home page. Or, would that get abused for SEO purposes ?
There is a way to prevent your feedburner feeds from being indexed. I found this on the web. You need to go to the feedburner Publicize tab and the option is there on the bottom left hand corner. Holistic Networking - Those Pesky Feeds![...] SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich » Noindex, follow for RSS Feeds? I won’t go in to why search engines seems to be indexing feeds — fact is: they do. The feed for my personal blog has PageRank 4 at the moment, which goes to show that Google even assigns some weight to it. Now think about it, wouldn’t it be cool if you had the equivalent of a noindex, follow (not nofollow) robots meta tag for RSS feeds? That way, the feed could be followed, search engines could spider and assign weight to the links within, yet it wouldn’t show the contents of your feed in the SERPs. [...] Guest post at SEOEgghead.com - SEO and Webdesign Blog - Joost de Valk[...] I did a guest post over at my SEOEgghead.com asking for noindex, follow for RSS feeds. Go check it out! [...] Why to not noindex your feed · SEO Buzz Box[...] 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): [...] pagerankblog.info » Guest post at SEOEgghead.com[...] I did a guest post over at my SEOEgghead.com asking for noindex, follow for RSS feeds. Go check it out! January 26th 2007 Posted to SEO, RSS [...] Cape Cod SEO » Tips For Getting Out of The Google Supplemental Results[...] I am adjusting the RSS coding so that the mime-type = “application/rss+xmlâ€. A good comment posted on SEO Egghead's blog recently. [...] NoIndex for RSS feeds! - SEO and Webdesign Blog - Joost de Valk[...] As regular readers might recall, I wrote a guestpost on SEOEgghead asking for an equivalent of "noindex, follow" for RSS feeds. Now it seems the search engines have been listening a bit, or at least have been thinking in the same direction… [...] NoIndex for RSS feeds! - SEO Blog - Joost de Valk[...] regular readers might recall, I wrote a guestpost on SEOEgghead asking for an equivalent of "noindex, follow" for RSS feeds. Now it seems the search [...] SEO für WordPress - doppelter Content - Feeds mit noindex belegen[...] fand da einige Tutorials zb bei SEO Egghead. Damit wurde ich selber nicht sehr glücklich. Genauso erging es mir bei Niall. Bei marketing [...]
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