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Yes, Google indexes XML files. You can try a search using filetype:xml I am not an expert on RSS files but I believe the XML versions use the <rss>tag. If I were to take a guess, I would say Google can easily examine the file (they read pdf's for example) and determine if it is an RSS feed.</rss>

A few other things to note for having parameters in URLs: In Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can instruct the search engines to ignore certain parameters, so that they'll treat domain.com/topic?keyword and domain.com/topic as the same page (if ?keyword doesn't change the page content) You can also place the rel=canonical element on pages.  So you could set domain.com/topic?keyword to rel canonical to domain.com/topic to pass its pagerank along.

Hi Michelleh, There's no need to block RSS feeds as they are used for discovery (Gbot). Here's a quirky fact: RSS feeds actually combat the scraper sites as they have absolute URLs which clearly link back to your site They're going to scrape your content anyhow, let's hope they choose RSS! How does G know it's an RSS feed? Let's look at some of the markup on RSS pages: <rss <span="">version</rss>="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel></channel> Either this or something similar will be in the HTML that defines an XML/RSS/Atom/XSL document/markup - this is easily read by Google. Not going to get too far into it but you can start reading more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS Does Google index the XML file type? **Yes. ** http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=667&q=inurl%3Asitemap.xml&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= Does that help?

Obviously you can look at PageRank, Domain Authority, and a slew of other factors, but I don't think there will ever be an exact metric to determine the value of a link.

Hi Michelle. The article you link to describes pagination issues. That is where you have a single topic whose length extends the page so you see multiple pages (page-2, page-3, etc). That has no relation to what I described, although it could be a factor with the solution EGOL shared. Keyword cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages on your site competing for search engine traffic for the same key word. That does not happen in this solution.

Thanks for the quick reply. I am wondering if the url structure of the url for an rss feed matters? such as /rss/[content type] vs feeds/domain/topic vs any other url structure for the feed. My suspicion is it probably doesn't matter, but i just want to make sure.

Is there a reason why JS is better than Divs/css or does it matter?

All from external sites,

Yes From the Matt Cutts / Eric Enge Interview Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank? Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page. Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank. Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages. For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

I'm working to remove low quality pages from a directory while at the same time allowing a few high quality pages in the same directory to be spidered and indexed.  To do this I placed a robots noindex tag on the low quality pages we don't want indexed. This noindex tags where implemented yesterday, but the low quality pages aren't going away.  I even used "Fetch as Googlebot" to force the crawl on a few of the low quality pages.  Maybe I need to give them a few days to disappear, but this got me thinking: "Why would Google ignore a robots noindex tag?"  Then I came up with a theory.  I noticed that we include a canonical tag by default on every page of our site including the ones I want to noindex.  I've never used a noindex tag in conjunction with a canonical tag, so maybe the canonical tag is confusing the SE spiders. I did some research and found a quote from Googler JohnMu in the following article:  http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020151.html  It's not an exact match to my situation because our canonical tag points to itself, rather than another URL.  But it does sound like using them together is a bad idea. Has anyone used or seen canonical and noindex tags together in the wild?  Can anyone confirm or deny this theory that the canonical screws up the efficacy of the meta robots tag?

I agree with Steven on everything he said. Google has been putting a lot of emphasis on making sure SEO's are utilizing GWT as a resource for usability and correct data.  I'd use that as your primary source.

hmm, I actually need a near to complete list if possible

Ensure you have unique and contextually relevant content ( text, images, video, audio) exposed on the dynamic page. As I understand it the engines are looking for content which has a valuable user experience. In the case of Google and Bing they are using their respective toolbars (and analytics services) to measure user engagement signals. In this case, quality and maintaining rank for pages is reliant on both the content and user acceptance of your content. Ask yourself a simply question, will this page satisfy any user who comes to it? I try and have a question and answer for each page on my site, if the page content does not answer the question then I think again about how I can best deal with solving that.

My "opinion" is that the website was slightly affected by the Panda update, and than a week or two later it started to gain back it's rankings or traffic.  This has been the behavior of many large websites after the first Panda update and it's continous updates, you would see a drop in traffic than couple weeks later it will level back off to it's usual traffic numbers before the Panda update that caused a slight drop. I most likley might be wrong here, but I am just making an assumption from observations I have seen on other websites.  Also from my understanding, subdomains are not as powerful as they use to be and are not really favored as much from the new "Panda" update.  I believe the preferred site architecture now is using sub-folders. I apologize if any of my statements above are false, and if they are please correct me.

Open Site Explorer is its own crawler, and is separate from the Google index. OSE just may not have crawled that particular page yet.

Hashtags can be used for multiple purposes in URLs but the only one I have personal experience with is their tracking ability. Two examples of services which can track URLs via hashtags are TYNT and AddThis. You add a code snippet to your site in much the same way that you add Google Analytics. From that point forward, all of your URLs will have a unique hash tag added. Anytime someone copies and pastes your URL, it will contain a this tag. When a user clicks on the link, you can identify the specific source via TYNT or AddThis. The service is free and they offer nice reporting options. Tynt is more experienced in this area, but AddThis offers other social sharing tools (facebook, twitter, google+1, etc) as well. I used to use TYNT until AddThis added the feature, which is when I switched to AddThis.

Yes, ok. Then I vote up Asim's answer becuase that's exactly what I do

A good way to know how many pages are indexed in Google is to check the Top Landing Pages in Google Analytics, It gives you a more interesting information than, IMHO, Google WBT itself, because those pages are the pages that actually are indexed and because of that receive traffic. DGgud.jpg

Hey Michelleh, Matt Cutts gives his advice about it in this video about publishing 100 pages at once....

Great, comprehensive answer from Ryan as ever. Nothing more to see here folks. Move along now. Move along.