I usually block all RSS feeds except for the main feed(s) on a site. I don’t know what the effect on blog search engines of blocking your Feedburner feed is (setting “noindex” through the Feedburner control panel), but recently I’ve been unblocking it.

Google recently said that they are going to stop indexing RSS feeds (first seen here), but I’ve still seen RSS feeds in the search results as recently as a few days ago.

When Google showed Supplemental Results, XML feeds would often be indexed in the Supplemental Results which made me think that Google considers them to be low quality, duplicate pages.

How do you handle indexing of your RSS/ATOM feeds? Do you think that search engines consider XML pages (RSS/ATOM feeds) to be duplicate content of the HTML pages?

Related posts:

1. RSS/ATOM Feeds Still in Google SERPs
2. How to Get Indexed by Google in Under 10 Minutes
3. Update: Moved to Full RSS/ATOM Feeds

HTML is made up of elements. Elements have start tags and ending tags.

This is an HTML title tag: <title>

This is an HTML title element: <title>This is a title</title>

The following image shows the start and end tags on a title element:

The W3C talks about it:

Elements are not tags. Some people refer to elements as tags (e.g., “the P tag”). Remember that the element is one thing, and the tag (be it start or end tag) is another.

When talking about SEO, use the phrase, "optimize your title elements".

Don’t Optimize Your Alt Tags Either

Another common mistake is to call attributes tags. For example, "optimize your alt tags".

Google shows over 800,000 Web pages that contain the text "alt tags" (probably incorrectly).

You should not add alt tags to your images — you should add alt attributes to your images.

Wikipedia has a good illustration that summarizes the sections of an HTML element:

I also recommend reading the Wikipedia page on HTML elements.

Related posts:

1. Google’s Vastly Improved Webmaster Guidelines
2. 12 1/2 Essential Firefox Extensions for SEO
3. Introduction to Advanced SEO Site Analysis for Large Web Sites