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    4. Is blocking RSS Feeds with robots.txt necessary?

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    Is blocking RSS Feeds with robots.txt necessary?

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    • nicole.healthline
      nicole.healthline last edited by

      Is it necessary to block an rss feed with robots.txt?

      It seems they are automatically not indexed (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html)

      And, google says here that it's important not to block RSS feeds

      (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/using-rssatom-feeds-to-discover-new.html)

      I'm just checking!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • DaveSottimano
        DaveSottimano last edited by

        Hi Michelleh,

        There's no need to block RSS feeds as they are used for discovery (Gbot). Here's a quirky fact: RSS feeds actually combat the scraper sites as they have absolute URLs which clearly link back to your site 🙂 They're going to scrape your content anyhow, let's hope they choose RSS!

        How does G know it's an RSS feed? Let's look at some of the markup on RSS pages:

        <rss <span="">version</rss>="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel></channel>

        Either this or something similar will be in the HTML that defines an XML/RSS/Atom/XSL document/markup - this is easily read by Google. Not going to get too far into it but you can start reading more here:

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

        Does Google index the XML file type? **Yes. **

        http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=667&q=inurl%3Asitemap.xml&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

        Does that help?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • nicole.healthline
          nicole.healthline @Thos003 last edited by

          How do they know it is an RSS feed? Does google not index the xml filetype?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Thos003
            Thos003 last edited by

            If google says not to block it then don't block it. They may not index the RSS but they can still crawl the RSS.

            nicole.healthline 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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