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Has anyone ever come across any authoritative statement from Google on their official position of whether RSS feeds should be noindexed or not?

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Short answer: Google does not publish a blanket rule that "RSS must be noindexed." Feeds are primarily a discovery mechanism for Google (and other services), and Google documents show feeds are used to find updates — podcast feeds are explicitly indexed in Google Search, while other feeds are treated as XML resources for discovery. For implementation and discovery guidance see Google’s Feedfetcher and the RSS/Atom best-practices note. (developers.google.com)

If the goal is to keep feed files out of search results, treat them as non-HTML resources and use the X‑Robots‑Tag HTTP header (X-Robots-Tag: noindex). Meta robots tags live inside HTML head and won’t work for raw XML; and you must not rely on robots.txt to implement noindex because a blocked URL prevents crawlers from seeing the noindex rule. In short: use X‑Robots‑Tag for feeds and avoid disallowing them if you want Google to observe your noindex. (developers.google.com)

Regarding ’s “thin content / domain quality” concern and vs : Google has a site‑level helpfulness signal — lots of unhelpful or low‑value content can affect how the site performs overall, and removing or hiding unhelpful pages can help other pages on the site. That makes it reasonable to either noindex genuinely thin posts or change your feed so it does not replicate full low‑value text. Changing the feed to excerpts and ensuring canonical signals point to the primary article reduces duplication risk. (developers.google.com)

Practical checklist (minimal disruption):

  • Prefer serving excerpts in feeds rather than full articles.
  • If you must hide the feed URL from Search, add an X-Robots-Tag: noindex header on the feed endpoint (do not block it via robots.txt). (developers.google.com)
  • For non-HTML resources, add an HTTP Link: <https://example.com/article>; rel="canonical" header when appropriate to point to the canonical page. (developers.google.com)
  • If you worry about Feedfetcher or third‑party fetchers, note that Feedfetcher may ignore robots.txt and that blocking it (serving 404/410 to the Feedfetcher‑Google UA) will also stop legitimate readers — use that only if you understand the tradeoff. (developers.google.com)

Example header (illustrative):

X-Robots-Tag: noindex
Link: <https://example.com/original-article>; rel="canonical"

Monitor results in Search Console after changes and prefer improving or consolidating low‑value posts where possible rather than relying on long‑term hiding as the only fix. (developers.google.com)

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Member Avatar for odeskavita

I think there’s no point in noindex RSS feeds as it does not help in ranking your website better. Using the noindex meta-tag for such feeds may have made sense in the past, but today it is not necessary to do so.

As they are simple to recognize by Google and other contemporary search engines, they take action by excluding it from web search results. Also, by noindex your RSS feeds, you are possibly inviting spammers to your site. Crawling feeds are simple as pie; even a child could program a crawler that can scrape the feed from your content in no time.

Member Avatar for Dani

My reason for noindexing RSS feeds are because they could be considered thin content, and therefore so many RSS feeds (thin content) could lower the overall domain quality rating.

How would noindexing RSS feeds inviting spammers?

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