Why does Google return RSS feeds in the SERPs?

This is very annoying.

[mikomido]

Why do they do this? I click on a SERP link and expect a Web page, but get asked to subscribe to a feed! There isn't even any indication that it's an RSS feed, like they give you with PDFs.

[idolw]

what is rss?

[kamikaze Optimizer]

A file format, see here:

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[xml.com...]

This is what it looks like, your view may vary depending on your browser:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: kamikaze_Optimizer at 10:31 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2007]

[trooperbill]

thank god for that... last thing we need littering google is yet more duplicate content in the form of rss feeds...

*groan* universal search is gonna suck too!

mark

[followgreg]

*groan* universal search is gonna suck too!

If universal search is what I see for about 1 week then yeah it already sucks in a quite ridiculous manner I 'd say :)

[conficio]

If you'd like search engines to use your RSS feed to discover new content, but don't want the RSS feed itself indexed, the only way to do it today is with a META tag, which, unfortunately, aren't universally-recognized by search engines.

noindex,follow would seem appropriate.

I have not seen any meta tags in RSS. So this is mute, at best you can do that in robots.txt, but only if all your RSS feeds are in a few dirs and not dynamic.

K<o>

[tedster]

Here's an update to the issue of feeds in search results. from the Official Google Webmaster blog:

Taking feeds out of our web search results

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, with the exception of podcasts (feeds with multimedia enclosures). We continue to allow podcasts, because we noticed a significant number of them are standalone documents (i.e. no HTML page has the same content) or they have more complete item descriptions than the associated HTML page.

[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

More details on the blog about how to noindex your podcast feed if you don't want it to be indexed.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:12 am (utc) on Feb 26, 2018]
[edit reason] fixed broken link [/edit]