Tuesday, February 20, 2007 at 12:18 PM
Does your site have a feed? A feed can connect you to your readers and keep them returning to your content. Most blogs have feeds, but increasingly, other types of sites with frequently changing content are making feeds available as well. Some examples of sites that offer feeds:- News sources such as the New York Times publish feeds of their latest stories
- Companies like Apple publish feeds of their press releases, as well as a few other feeds.
- Blogs including the Official Google Blog publish feeds with their latest posts
- Shopping sites like Buy.com publish feeds with noteworthy deals
If your site has a feed, you can now get information about the number of Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers. If you use Feedburner, you'll start to see numbers from these subscriptions taken into account. You can also find this number in the crawling data in your logs. We crawl feeds with the user-agent Feedfetcher-Google, so simply look for this user-agent in your logs to find the subscriber number. If multiple URLs point to the same feed, we may crawl each separately, so in this case, just count up the subscriber numbers listed for each unique feed-id. An example of what you might see in your logs is below:
User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=1794595805790851116)
Making your feed available to Google
You can submit your feed as a Sitemap in webmaster tools. This will let us know about the URLs listed in the feed so we can crawl and index them for web search. In addition, if you want to make sure your feed shows up in the list of available feeds for Google products, simply add a <link> tag with the feed URL to the <head> section of your page. For instance:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://www.example.com/atom.xml" />
Remember that Feedfetcher-Google retrieves feeds only for use in Google Reader and Personalized Homepage. For the content to appear in web search results, Googlebot will have to crawl it as well.
Don't yet have a feed?
If you use a content management system or blogging platform, feed functionality may be built right now. For instance, if you use Blogger, you can go to Settings > Site Feed and make sure that Publish Site Feed is set to Yes. You can also set the feed to either full or short and can add a footer. The URL listed here is what subscribers add to their feed readers. A link to this URL will appear on your blog.
More tips from the Google Reader team
In order to provide the best experience for your users, the Google Reader team has also put together some tips for feed publishers. This document covers feed best practices, common implementation pitfalls, and various ways to promote your feeds. Whether you're creating your feeds from scratch or have been publishing them for a long time, we encourage you to take a look at our tips to make the most of your feeds. If you have any questions, please get in touch.
8 comments:
On the advice of a couple of blog posts I've read in the last several months, I've been using the following line in my robots.txt file to avoid having duplicate content indexed (or not indexed) by Google:
Disallow: /feed
My feed is being picked up by Google Reader, and the non-feed posts are also being crawled by Googlebot (though they occasionally drop into the supplemental index, but that's another issue altogether).
Do I gain anything if I remove the "disallow: /feed" line from my robots.txt file?
Do I lose anything?
"In addition, if you want to make sure your feed shows up in the list of available feeds for Google products, simply add a link tag with the feed URL to the section of your page. For instance:
"codeexample.."
"
I am sorry but I don't understand the above fully?
Thanks David. Looks like the HTML got mangled. I've fixed it now. It should say to add the link tag to the head section of your page.
Eric, if you prefer the content to be indexed using the non-feed URL, then it sounds like you have everything set up fine.
Thanks, Vanessa.
I've noticed recently that Google is indexing the rss comments rather than the pages of my blog. Page titles have 2.0 - preceding the title - and then Comments.
site:gaiacapitalist.squarespace.com
example listing:
2.0 Gaia Capitalism - Comments - Ben and Jerry's Sweet Gaia ...
This is keeping my pages out of the rankings. Why is this happening and how can I fix it?
Hi - I have my web page set up with 9 pages of content. I have a valid site map, I have analytics working, but Google webmaster tools still tells me I am not being indexed in Google. What do I need to do? The web site is
www.spanishimmersiononline.com
Help! Eric
I have been trying to figure out how to submit my blogger blog and am drawing a blank. The new layout provides no way to insert anything in the header field. I find no place to submit a feed. I finally made my own list of urls and related sites and called it site feed and published it. I doubt that is what Google has in mind but I am stumped.
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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