FeedBurner Feeds Are Not in Google Search Results Anymore

Google has removed all FeedBurner RSS feeds from their main web search index. Even RSS feeds that are syndicated via the FeedBurner are no longer available in Google Search. This is true for all feeds that exist on FeedBurner irrespective of the NOINDEX settings that you may have configured through the FeedBurner Dashboard.

Though the XML feeds of Blogger blogs (blogspot.com/feeds/posts/.. and blogger.com/feeds/..) are still indexed by Google, it should not surprise if blogspot feeds also face the Google axe just like FeedBurner feeds.

This is probably an excellent step from Google for two reasons - one, it solves (to some extent) the problem of duplicate content and two, when non-techie users click on search results that point to RSS feeds and not regular web pages, they may not know how to deal with them and quickly leave.

advanced search — query date range

OK if any of you read Matt Cutts blog, then you must have already seen a post on this new advance search feature that's been added to Google. If you haven't and want to read what the heck is this all about, here you go. The new feature that's been added by Google is to search the pages for a particular query using the operator as_qdr (tentatively stands for advanced search — query date range) in address bar of Google.

OK if that's too tough to understand let's take an example. Let's say you are searching for the query research at MDI and you want to search for pages resulting using this query over last 2 weeks. All you have to do is just type the following in your address bar:

http://www.google.com/search?q=research+at+MDI&as_qdr=w2

You might wanna check out the first result :)

Of course I have used this example to show that over the past 2 weeks google has indexed around 26000 pages and the top result is from my blog. This also suggests that Google has crawled my blog in the last week 2 week. I am smart and I have not used as_qdr=w1 because my blog hasn't been crawled in last week.

The parameters that the operator as_qdr takes is as follows (scraping it from Matts Blog)

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)

w[number] - past number of weeks

y[number] - past number of years

So next time you want to refine your search and impress your colleagues and/or your clients feel free to boast about your uncanny knack of being a smart Google operators user.

Technorati Tags: as_qdr, advanced search — query date range, google, research at mdi, research