Google News, Inside.

I was checking my subscriber count to see if Google had fixed the integration with Feedburner and Webmaster Tools so that they sync up exactly, but alas, it still does not. It still only pulls in the number of Google Reader subscribers.

After checking that, I noticed an Add button next to the ginside.com/feed/ which I thought was a little odd; so I clicked it, naturally. It added my /feed/ as a sitemap for my site.

Interesting…I hadn’t thought about an RSS feed serving as a sitemap, but in reality, it really could. It’s a sitemap that serves the most recent data, under normal circumstances.

Here’s what it looks like,

Then, after doing that, it will show up as a sitemap, like so,

At first, I thought this was dumb because why would you want to have your feed as a sitemap. But after thinking about it a little bit more, I realized it’s actually a great idea. It’s a great idea because it tells Google exactly what the latest and freshest content is coming from your site, in turn, which content needs to be crawled the fastest.

So if you have your site as part of Google Webmaster Tools, I strongly recommend that you submit your RSS feed as a sitemap.