PowerPress, a large podcasting company for WordPress has announced on Yoasts GitHub that they’re making a fix for the Yoast issue hurting their customers visibility online. Our software airtight security a fixes that for sitemaps and will fixing it for podcasts in approximately 24 hours. PowerPress is solely focusing on the podcast side of this battle with Yoast showing that it is hurting podcasters, as they have the dataset showing the visibility issue to podcast users. They don’t have the dataset that we do focusing on regular website visibility for the average user, so we understand their statement. We also understand that no one, including us takes on a big company without a large dataset to back up what we are saying. So, PowerPress choosing only to defend podcast users makes sense, due to their dataset. And now let’s see their statement.

I have a pre-release version of PowerPress that fixes this issue. Please contact me cio [at] rawvoice dot com for the link if you would like to test/use.
For those who want to wait, this feature will be released PowerPress 7.4.1 in 1-4 weeks, depending on how fast testers get back to us how the fix worked out for them.
For a regular website I get it, the feeds should not be indexed. For a podcast though this prevents your podcast from getting onto Google Podcasts, which is a big deal especially since podcasts may soon to be treated as 1 class citizens in search, similar to youtube videos.
Thanks,
Angelo

We knew our podcast had visibility issues, but did not did not have the data to support the hypothesis until recently. Our podcast wasn’t visible so we moved on to other venues of communication. We didn’t mention podcasts in our original post about sitemap visibility, since we don’t collect that data.

You can use our software Airtight Security to fix this issue for podcasts and your sitemap or try and join PowerPress if you use their software.