RSS Mime type
What’s the most correct MIME type for RSS feeds? For many developers this matter is a bit of a headache, as there are many differences with regard to application and browser support for application/rss+xml. For that reason, there seems to be a general preference for text/xml, as it’s the safest bet. So after reading Dave Winer’s advice on the matter, I decided to use the text/xml MIME type for my website’s RSS feeds as well.
My view on the most correct MIME type has changed recently though. The cause of this is that — for whatever reason — Google started ranking my website’s RSS feeds higher than the actual pages, which is obviously not very desirable, nor for the visitor, nor for me.
My initial response was to block Googlebot from indexing any of the RSS feeds via the robots.txt file. A bit later, realizing that this ’solution’ would also quite effectively erase all feeds from Google Blogsearch, I decided to switch to the application/rss+xml MIME type after all.
Luckily, the RSS Advisory Board agrees with my action.
