Oct 30 2009

Google Now Uses RSS/Atom Feeds to Discover New Websites

The Google Webmaster Central Blog has just posted a short note to announce that Google is now using RSS/Atom feeds to discover new webpages. In other words Google is now indexing and crawling not only contents found on websites and blogs but contents that are syndicated from them through RSS/Atom feeds.Whereas before, Google relies mainly on the links provided on website and blog contents, now your site can be found by Google through RSS/Atom feeds that are published on online RSS Feed reader, such as Google Reader.

What does this mean? Well, although you can already submit your sites/blogs through mapsite system, this feature will make your site/blogs discoverable even if you don’t submit a website sitemap to Google.

If you want your RSS /Atom feeds to discovered by Google make sure you allow crawling of robots.txt.

Written By:

Arnold Zafra

Arnold Zafra writes daily on the announcements by Google, Ask.com, Yahoo & MSN along with how these announcements effect web publishers. He is currently building three niche blogs covering iPad News, Google Android Phones and E-Book Readers.

More Posts By Arnold Zafra

Jobby

If you never knew this two years ago, shame on you
Michael Martinez

Yeah. We can welcome more comment spam with open arms.

Thank you, Google. You really do make the Internet a more interesting place (in the classic Chinese sense).
Mike S

Hey Arnold.
This is great news, especially for us bloggers.