Google has recently announced in its Webmaster Central Blog that it will now use RSS/Atom feeds to discover new webpages. RSS/Atom feeds have been very popular in recent years as a mechanism for content publication. Using feeds for discovery allows Google to get the new page index more quickly than conventional crawling methods. Google may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds. How does it benefit? The answer is that this feature will make your site/blogs indexed even if you don’t submit a website sitemap to Google.

But the most important thing is that to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it’s important that crawling these files are not disallowed by your robots.txt (A robots.txt file restricts access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web). So, now Google is indexing not only contents found on websites and blogs but also those contents that are syndicated from them through RSS/Atom feeds.

For more information, visit Google Discover New Websites or Official Google Blog.