Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
Taking feeds out of our web search results
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Written by Bogdan Stănescu, Software Engineer
As a webmaster, you may have been concerned about your RSS/Atom feeds crowding out their associated HTML pages in Google's search results. By serving feeds, we could cause a poor user experience:
Feeds increase the likelihood that users see duplicate search results.
Users clicking on a feed may miss valuable content available only in the HTML page.
To address these concerns, we prevent feeds from being returned in Google's search results, with the exception of podcasts (feeds with multimedia enclosures). We continue to allow podcasts, because we noticed a significant number of them are standalone documents (i.e. no HTML page has the same content) or they have more complete item descriptions than the associated HTML page. However, if, as a webmaster, you'd like your podcasts to be excluded from Google's search results (e.g. if you have a vlog, its feed is probably a podcast), you can use
Yahoo's spec for noindex feeds
. If you use
FeedBurner
, making your podcast noindex is as simple as checking a box ("Noindex" under the "Publicize" tab).
As a user, you may ask yourself whether Google has a way to search for feeds. The answer is yes; both
Google Reader
and
iGoogle
allow searching for feeds to subscribe to.
We're aware that there are a few non-podcast feeds out there with no associated HTML pages, and thus removing these feeds for now from the search results might be less than ideal. We remain open to other feedback on how to improve the handling of feeds, and especially welcome your comments and questions in the
Crawling, Indexing and Ranking
subtopic of our Webmaster Help Group.
For the German version of this post, go to "
Wir entfernen Feeds aus unseren Suchergebnissen
."
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Check here if your site is mobile-friendly.
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