John Mueller was asked about RSS feeds in the latest Google Webmaster Hangout, specifically whether there are any SEO benefits to having an RSS feed on the site.

In general, there’s two aspects involved there.  One, is if you are looking for a ranking boost by having an RSS feed, that’s not going to happen.  The RSS feed is really something we see as more of a technical help to crawl and index the content a bit better.  So if you have a website that is changing content fairly quickly, a news website, a blog with a  lot of new content, maybe even a shop that has lots of new content, then the RSS feed really helps us stay on top of things so we can pick up on all of those new URLs and crawl them as soon as we can.

So if we recognize that the RSS feed is working fine, then we can get a ping from the RSS feed, then we’ll pick up the RSS feed.  We’ll try to crawl those pages that are updated there maybe within seconds.  So that’s something that works really, really quickly.

He reconfirms once again that there isn’t a boost for using an RSS.

There’s no direct ranking boost for the website itself.

He does say that an RSS can help them discover new content faster.

If there’s something new on your site and the RSS helps us find it faster, then we can show it in search faster.

It’s not that there is a bonus for the existing content for everything else, just by having an RSS feed.

He does say that while sitemaps do well, if a site has thousands of updates a day, an RSS feed might be the better solution.

So an RSS can help Google discover new content faster, it won’t give an additional bonus or boost simply for using an RSS.