7 ms·

Sitemap was submitted and search console says it is good on day one. Robots.txt is in place I think of RSS as more of a bloggers tool...am I thinking of this

Sitemap was submitted and search console says it is good on day one. Robots.txt is in place I think of RSS as more of a bloggers tool...am I thinking of this wrong.

SyneRyder 8d ago
If you're only concerned about Google, then that's probably all you need to / can do. It won't even matter to Google whether or not you put a "Sitemap:" line in your robots.txt if you submitted it directly with them. As for RSS, Google do regard RSS as another sitemap format. There's info here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... I would not submit an RSS file to Google as your sitemap, stick to XML. But also having RSS can be useful for search indexers, because in one RSS download they can find which pages are new, and can index the actual relevant content of the page without all the ads & other cruft. An RSS feed is really like a newsletter about your website. So if there's anything where visitors to your website might find value in keeping updated via an email newsletter, consider putting that same "newsletter" content also online, and making that your RSS feed. If the content in your RSS feed contains links to the other pages of your website, that can help with page discovery etc. Something like "we just updated the XYZ product page, check it out!" is zero value, but if you've got an article about "Here's how the brand new ABC feature we just added XYZ Product works", then linking to XYZ Product from within the article & RSS content will make sense. It helps the search engines, but it also helps the user who might want to click through to the product that your article is about.
- jimnotgym 8d ago
  Thank you. When I add the next updates (maybe that i found one of the objects on my site is on a military firing range!) I should add a news blog and RSS. Thanks

Sitemap was submitted and search console says it is good on day one. Robots.txt is in place I think of RSS as more of a bloggers tool...am I thinking of this wrong.

SyneRyder 8d ago

If you're only concerned about Google, then that's probably all you need to / can do. It won't even matter to Google whether or not you put a "Sitemap:" line in your robots.txt if you submitted it directly with them. As for RSS, Google do regard RSS as another sitemap format. There's info here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/... I would not submit an RSS file to Google as your sitemap, stick to XML. But also having RSS can be useful for search indexers, because in one RSS download they can find which pages are new, and can index the actual relevant content of the page without all the ads & other cruft. An RSS feed is really like a newsletter about your website. So if there's anything where visitors to your website might find value in keeping updated via an email newsletter, consider putting that same "newsletter" content also online, and making that your RSS feed. If the content in your RSS feed contains links to the other pages of your website, that can help with page discovery etc. Something like "we just updated the XYZ product page, check it out!" is zero value, but if you've got an article about "Here's how the brand new ABC feature we just added XYZ Product works", then linking to XYZ Product from within the article & RSS content will make sense. It helps the search engines, but it also helps the user who might want to click through to the product that your article is about.

jimnotgym 8d ago
Thank you. When I add the next updates (maybe that i found one of the objects on my site is on a military firing range!) I should add a news blog and RSS. Thanks