RSS

An RSS feed includes articles and content from a website in a stripped-down interface, providing a stream of updates to users in an easy-to-read format. To understand the impact RSS feeds can have on a site’s SEO, our Office Hours Notes below cover guidance and insights from Google.

Google Doesn’t Have a Preference Between RSS Feeds & Google News Sitemaps

July 10, 2018 Source

RSS Feeds and Google News sitemaps both work for Google and there is no preference between the two. The benefit of RSS feeds for webmasters is that there is no limit of URLs, whereas Google News sitemaps are limited to 1,000 pages.

RSS Feeds Don’t Have SEO Benefits Beyond Content Discovery

November 14, 2017 Source

RSS feeds don’t have any SEO benefit other than helping Google to discover content, much like a sitemap. Having an RSS feed doesn’t improve rankings, for example.

PubSubHubbub is the fastest way to get content into Google

May 5, 2017 Source

RSS feeds with PubSubHubbub are a quickest way to get content updated in Google.

RSS with Pubsubhubbub to get URLs Indexed

February 10, 2017 Source

You can use an RSS feed with Pubsubhubbub to ping Google with new URLs as an alternative to Sitemaps.

Google Uses Dates to Determine Fresh Content

July 29, 2016 Source

Google may look at dates in an RSS feed or on a page to understand if it’s fresh content or evergreen content.

Last Modified In Sitemaps Aids Crawling

July 8, 2016 Source

Google thinks the Last Modified date in an XML Sitemap can be very useful to help them recrawl URLs, and they also support RSS and Atom feeds.

RSS + PubSubHubbub is better than XML sitemaps

September 11, 2015 Source

John recommends using RSS with PubSubHubbub as the fastest way to get new content indexed.

Related Topics

Crawling Indexing Crawl Budget Crawl Errors Crawl Rate Disallow Directives in Robots.txt Sitemaps Last Modified Nofollow Noindex Canonicalization Fetch and Render