Over on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, it has been announced that the leading search engine are now using RSS/Atom feeds to discover new URLs to add to their index. The aim of this new method is to reduce the time it takes to find and index a new webpage.

Here’s what Google have to say about it:

“Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds.”

[Source: Webmaster Central Blog, 29/10/09]

To see if your RSS feed is available to be crawled, you can test your feed URLs using the Robots.txt tester within your Webmaster Tools account.