Reporting Breaking News or Live Events? Add a RSS/Atom Feed to Your Site

In a recent Google Webmaster Central blog post, new 'best practices' for sitemaps were outlined.

"For optimal crawling, we recommend using both XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds. XML sitemaps will give Google information about all of the pages on your site. RSS/Atom feeds will provide all updates on your site, helping Google keep your content fresher in the index."

The reason for this new recommendation is because RSS/Atom feeds are smaller (compared to XML sitemaps) and are downloaded more regularly. However, the more we researched this the more we realized that it's only something you need to worry about if you're pushing out content that needs to be found within minutes. This could be the case if you're reporting live events or the breaking news on your site.

Here are some of the best practices summarized:

• URLs in both XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds must be able to be fetched by Googlebox and be canonical URLs only (don't include URLs of duplicate pages).
• Include the last modification time for each URL!
• XML Sitemap Advice: Update a single XML sitemap once a day, if your site changes often. For a set of sitemaps, maximize the number of URLs in each sitemap.
• RSS/Atom feed Advice: When an existing page has a big update or a new page is added, add the URL and modification time to the feed. Google recommends using PubSubHubbub or some uniform system of having all the updates in the RSS/Atom Feed.

To read the whole story, including code examples, visit the Google Webmaster Central blog.