RSS feeds and Google blog search

[cjsmith]

Paraphrasing some stuff in a friendslocked entry I found. Good info; I'll try to do it justice. Hat tip to runeshower.

Google is currently indexing the contents of LiveJournal blogs' RSS feeds.

RSS feeds don't (at the moment) contain a "block robots/spiders" setting. Google is working on how to respect this setting ANYWAY; they expect to have a fix within the next week.

RSS feeds contain only your public entries. If private or friendslocked content shows up on Google Blog Search, it was indexed at a time when those entries were public. To request its removal you'll have to talk to Google about it.

You can't completely shut off your RSS feed, but you CAN shrink it down to contain only the titles of your entries. To do this, go to the LiveJournal console and enter the command set synlevel title.

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I've done the "set synlevel title" command, and I have "block robots/spiders" checked. However, now that I'm thinking about this a bit, I'm half inclined to allow spiders and let Google index my posts. One of the reasons I flail about with LJ memories so much is that it's so danged hard to SEARCH. Google is certainly equipped to solve that problem! And hey, all public content was already public well before Google began caching it. Pretending there are folks who can't see it or won't find it is a recipe for getting badly hurt. All I'll have to do is make sure I don't put my e-mail address in my entries. I get enough spam.

Comments

[anisoptera.livejournal.com]

For useful. Thank you very much. 98 is concerned about the issue of seeing parts of locked posts in a google search. I've pointed him at your post.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Glad it's useful! :)