A client was wondering why individuals and search engines are not finding their news feed. They have several RSS feeds off of a number of internal pages. However, these deep links were not found by individuals or search engines.

This is not uncommon. The best practice for the solution is to identify the RSS feeds on the site’s home page. This identification will then result in the display of all news feeds when the home page URL is placed in a news reader. In addition, search engines will then be able to more readily find and scan the feeds.

The code is simple. You should have the following placed on the home page so that the RSS feeds may be discovered by crawlers and readers. One line is placed in for each RSS feed. Change url/to/rss/file to the full URL for the RSS file.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="url/to/rss/file">

This should be something that is coded into all sites we manage that have RSS feeds. Any TypePad or Wordpress sites have this function built into the home page via the CMS.

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