Creating Custom Feeds with Google Reader

Ever wanted to follow a website’s feed but it didn’t offer any? Google has now integrated a new feature into Google Reader that allows users to receive alerts whenever any new feed for a domain or a specific web page becomes available.

Why Is That Important?

If the websites that you follow contains integrated feed services then this isn’t something you should consider. However, if there’s one of two pages you like to follow but wished you could just get their feed instead, wish no more.

Remember, this option is only available for Google Reader, so if you’re not using GR you might consider switching. Google lets you add web pages simply and easily, track their feed, and alert whenever new feed has arrived.

On the other hand, if you do not want to publish your feed from your pages, simply opt out and Google will not update viewer’s feeds when you publish new content. In order to opt out you must do 1 of the 2 things:

1. Add a new meta tag to each page that you don’t want Google to read: <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noarchive”>
2. Use robots.txt to block Google crawler alltogether