Google's New RSS Features as an SEO Vehicle?

Robin Good takes a far more positive outlook of Google's new RSS features than I do, proclaiming that this actually means Google is now indexing RSS feeds, although it's still unclear what they intend to do with them.

"So in one shot Google opens up officially to full RSS adoption and use, launches an online RSS aggregator that is easy and functional to use and opens up the door for RSS feed submissions directly to its indexes.

And for those of you interested in increasing the reach and visibility of your RSS feeds, you now have a fast, easy and direct way to submit your those feeds to Google itself."

Robin also gives instructions on how to do this easily:

"a) If you don't have a Google Account click here and create one now.
b) Sign in on the Google Personalized Home Page.
c) Look at the left column and click on "Create a section".
d) Input your RSS or Atom feed directly."

Well, for one, we can't really be sure of what Google is doing with the RSS feeds "manually submited". Knowing how much they're investing in their indexing, ranking and search technology I'm having my doubts whether this really changes anything, since it's not difficult to presume that Google's already indexing RSS feeds. It would certainly be easy for them to do so.

And considering Google's complex ranking algorithms, it's questionable whether these manual submissions will have any weight at all.

But Robin does have a point - why not be optimistic about this?

Well, we certainly can be, as long as we don't start using personalized Google for RSS reading, which really dissapoints in a manner difficult to express.

Google has the strength to really move the RSS market further, although not as much as Microsoft. They have the strength to provide us with advanced and much needed features such as RSS filtering and search.

And yet they chose to do launch an RSS reader with such limited functionality, in a time when RSS has already become a key content consumption channel, that it really almost doesn't deserve the name. Dissapointing.