Disallow feed access for RSS and ATOM

Ever had a feed that you wanted to be private? Then you might know that this is a hard thing to do, because feeds are being spidered by more and more services (readers, search engines, reading lists, etc) so a robots.txt isn’t helping anymore. Bloglines to the rescue because they are proposing an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed. Setting the access restriction to ‘deny’ will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed.

In Bloglines, they will be using this to prevent the display of the feed information or posts in search results or any other public venue. If other readers and aggregators use the information in the same way, and publishers of feeds, including services that let users create feeds, implement this, we could have a new standard!

For technical details on the RSS and ATOM extension, click here.