Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.

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

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!

For duplicate pages created by the "print" function,

seomoz says its better to use noindex (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not)

and JohnMu says its better to use canonical http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6c18b666a552585d&hl=en

What do you think?

So, if someone links to www.domain.com/abc#xyz and www.domain.com/abc#nz, then it is the same as linking twice to www.domain.com/abc?

Thanks!

How do search engines treat urls that end in hashtags? For example, www.domain.com/abc#xyz.

When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?

When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options:

1. robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters

• Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages
• Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag
• make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file