Google to detect updates from sites without RSS

Google Reader is one of Google’s lesser know products but something that has revolutionised the way some people read content online.

Essentially Google Reader is an RSS aggregator; it allows you to manage RSS feeds generated from sites. You then access these from an online dashboard (work, home, mobile), thus ensuring you keep up to date with your favourite sites. This removes the need for you to visit the site to check for updates, new content comes to you.

The one requirement for a site is to produce a RSS feed of new content, if you don’t produce a feed then readers are unable to subscribe and receive the updates to your site. Blogs, the BBC, Google News and some UK newspapers generate RSS feeds, but sites that rely on page impressions for advertising have been reluctant to create feeds (some produce partial feeds, title and first 250 characters of the body).

Google now have updated their Google Reader product to simulate an RSS from sites lacking a feed. A quick test of the new feature on an official football site (majority of the 92 football league sites don’t have RSS) didn’t generate great results, picking up the change in the “next fixture” but not the new news items on the page.

From a technical perspective it looks like Google are using the cached page from the search bot, comparing it to the pervious cache to detect the differences. This could mean that pages that have the date and time displayed would be detected as ‘updated’ even if no new content is added to the page.

To keep the likes of Rupert Murdoch happy Google have allowed an opt-out option with the use of the no archive googlebot tag.

From an SEO perspective if the new feature works well it could provide data to detect the frequency of page changes (added new content is a must for natural rankings) on competitors.