Need help setting up rss feeds properly for search engines

robots.txt, nofollow and noindex

[pavlovapete]

Hi all,

I'm using the rd_rss component with the Joomla CMS to produce rss feeds. I do not want the search engines to index my feeds - I'm a bit worried about duplicate content issues. I'd like to do the following and hope you can tell me if I am on the right track.

1: Disallow: index.php?option=com_rd_rss&id=4 in the robots.txt file -should I specify the file exactly like this?
2: add rel="nofollow" on all internal site links to my feeds
3: somehow add <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /> to the xml feed itself - can I mix a meta tag with the xml rss feed and will this work?

Should I xsl style the xml or make the feed HTML just in case a search engine indexes the feed and a user clicks into the feed?

Thaks for any advice

Cheers

[bill]

If RSS feeds were considered duplicate content and penalized by any search engines then you'd hear a lot more about it, believe me.

robots.txt

If you deny your feed to all robots then it won't get indexed in the RSS/blog search engines either...if they follow the robots.txt standard in the first place.

add rel="nofollow" on all internal site links to my feeds

The nofollow attribute doesn't mean that links aren't followed and indexed. It just shows that you don't trust the link and that the SEs shouldn't pass along any link-love to the target. I've never heard of this being used for RSS/XML links.

[pavlovapete]

OK Bill,

thanks. Guess I will not worry too much about it.

Cheers

[edited by: encyclo at 11:02 pm (utc) on April 4, 2007]
[edit reason] thread splice [/edit]

[traveldude]

I've stayed away from RSS feeds because of duplicate content concerns. If there is no penalty, that begs the question does adding a feed help SEO ranking?