Google removing feeds from search results

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It’s about time…

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:

1. Feeds increase the likelihood that users see duplicate search results.
2. 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

I’d have to say, Serving feeds HAS caused a poor user experience.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Taking feeds out of our web search results

Blog

December 18

Comments

google rss

Lance

Thank you for this information. It's good to know.

Lance

Jared

It makes sense, but it would be nice if there was an option (or search operator) to include them as well.

As the popularity of theme mods increases, I've run into several times where only the feed content is available, because the blog owner screwed up their theme and made their HTML version not be able to load.

Overall, I think it's good to not include them in the search results by default, though.