How to Remove Feeds From Google Index

If you are aiming for traffics from Google, the last thing you want to end up is having duplicates of a same content being indexed by Google. They will eventually being treated as supplemental. Feeds is one of the content you don’t want to get indexed as they are duplicates of your original contents. Here’s few ways to remove feeds from getting indexed drawn after a little discussion with Ashish.

Add nofollow to Feed Button

Check your feed button, make sure it comes with a rel="nofollow" within the hyerlink codes.

Add nofollow to Comment Feeds and Trackbacks

feed button

If you provide feeds and trackback for single post, you should add rel="nofollow" to them too. Adding these codes varies from themes to themes, but big chance you might find them inside comments.php.

Activate NoIndex in Feedburner

feed button

If you are using Feedburner, head over to Publicize -> NoIndex and check on Indicate that your feed should not be indexed by search engines.

Add Disallow /feed in robots.txt

Add these following into your robots.txt to suggest feed related contents should not be crawled.

Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /*/feed/
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/

This should stop bots from indexing all contents related to feeds.

Comments

Nicholas June 21st, 2007

I still don’t really understand what does this mean. Is it that you don’t want your feed side to appear in google ?
Reply
hongkiat June 21st, 2007

See when your entry

http://www.domain.com/content1/

is indexed by google, sometimes even the feed gets indexed too.

http://www.domain.com/content1/feed/

Both of them have the same content, thats a duplicates and the entry above guide you through removing them, avoiding them from getting index.
Reply
Nicholas June 21st, 2007

Oh I see, so what is the point of preventing them from indexing?
Reply
He He June 21st, 2007

To have better ranking for your post.
because soemtimes feed can rank higher than your post.
when people click on the link, it will bring you to the feed page and thare aren’t any ads or links showing out on that page.

duplicate content might cause google ban your website.
Reply
FreeListed June 21st, 2007

Good point. I never thought about it. I just changed all my website feed to rel=”nofollow” Thanks.
Reply
Coder June 29th, 2007

Thank you.
Reply
J.D. July 10th, 2007

Good tip.

I started noticing the problem a few weeks ago when Google traffic began coming in for the feed rather than the blog content pages. As soon as someone hits the feed XML page rather than text content, they just leave – a wasted opportunity.
Reply
vicky May 22nd, 2008

help. can someone just push a button for me and make google stop following me around?
Reply
Jim January 5th, 2009

Doesn’t this stop your new pages getting indexed (at least effect how quickly they are indexed, if not completely), especially for blogs?
Reply
bluesygirl November 3rd, 2009

After changing my theme this problem happened to me. I had my robots.txt set up to not index /feeds/

However my new theme uses /feed

This messed me up because a very popular post got indexed using my feedburner feed instead of my website. AND it happens to be #3 in google. Learned my lesson. Thanks for the info on how to fix.
Reply