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Did you know? WordPress automatically creates a feed for your website, and even for every single post, under URLs ending in “/feed/.” For example, if you publish a post at “yoururl.com/our-services/”, WordPress also provides “yoururl.com/our-services/feed/.”
Many SEOs know about this, but they don’t pay much attention to it, because Google doesn’t treat feeds as regular pages and doesn’t penalize websites for having them. So, they think it’s not an SEO issue.
Not so fast!
Today, I will talk about the hidden downside of feeds on your website.
WordPress Automatic Feeds: An Invitation to Content Thieves
The automatic feed generator of WordPress and other CMS platforms makes your content available in a structured format for so-called feed readers.
Back in the 2000s, many people subscribed to RSS feeds to follow their favorite websites. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Today, only a small minority of readers still use feed readers.
- When was the last time you used an RSS feed reader?
- Do you have one on your phone?
- Did you remember what RSS stands for?
To be fair, feeds are not dead. Podcasts are distributed via RSS, and some news aggregators and email newsletter tools still rely on feeds. But for a typical business website, the number of real people reading your content through a feed is tiny.
The real problem is that feeds attract spam.
If you’re an SEO and haven’t heard about this, you might ask: “Whooot?”
Let me explain why feeds can work against your website from an SEO standpoint.
The SEO Disadvantages of Feeds
One group that loves feeds is spammers across the web. By providing feeds on your website, you are inviting spam websites to easily copy your content. While crawling a website the way Google does requires a sophisticated web crawler, scraping a feed is as easy as pie. A child could program a script that scrapes the articles from your feed in no time. The reason is that feeds are based on XML, a machine-readable, standardized format published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The feed delivers your article in a perfectly structured and standardized way.
Websites that provide feeds leave the door open for spammers worldwide to copy their content.
Crawling shouldn’t be made that easy. Why make it easy for anybody to copy your website? If you do, scrapers will take your content, and feeds are the easiest way for them to do it.
How Spammers Use Feeds to Steal Your Content
Shady web directories, spam search engines, and similar bizarre websites have made it their business model to scrape feed-based websites, because it’s so easy to do. If your website has existed for some time and offers feeds, it has likely already been copied by these websites. You might have noticed that your images and texts appear as teasers on many other websites that look like search engines, domain review websites, press portals, and whatnot. They all disguise themselves to look legitimate, but their only purpose is to republish third-party content: your content!
Many of them don’t even respect the robots exclusion standard (robots.txt), and many operate from countries where it’s hard to enforce copyright claims against them.
Just search for a sentence from one of your articles on Google, and you may see how many copies of your text already exist on the web. Google is usually good at recognizing the original source, and it generally ignores spammy links pointing to your site. But scraped copies still dilute your content, and occasionally a copy can even outrank the original. That’s a risk you don’t need to take.
How to Avoid These Spammers
- Disable Feeds
The first thing you can do is disable the feed feature, so WordPress or any other CMS you’re using stops providing feeds. Basically, stop feeding spammers. WordPress itself has no setting for this, so you have to install a plugin that does the job for you. The Disable Feeds plugin by Samir Shah is a popular option. It simply redirects all /feed/ URLs to the corresponding post or page. And it’s free: install it, activate it, mission accomplished. - Update Robots.txt
Another method is to block unwanted bots in your robots.txt file. However, this might have only a minor effect, as many spammers ignore what’s in the robots.txt.
Once you have deactivated feeds, simple scraper bots are much less likely to bother with your website. Many of them don’t have the skills to program complex crawlers; they just look for easily scrapable, XML-based content: feeds. And as long as millions of other websites offer feeds, they will simply move on.
Before you disable your feeds, check whether you need them: If you run a podcast, use an email newsletter tool that pulls your posts from your feed, or rely on news aggregators that read your feed, keep it active.
Google doesn’t need your feed to find your content. It crawls your website and your XML sitemap, regardless of whether you offer feeds or not. Without feeds, your website is still crawled by the big search engines, and you keep the door locked for the intruders who can only access your content easily through XML feeds.
I want to know if this is normal. I disabled feed and since my site disappears from google
I have to say, I agree with Chris.
1. I use RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) to aggregate posts from publishers I trust. What is the alternative? Social Media? No thanks.
2. Criminals don't need RSS to steal content. Thieves are going to steal, regardless. Happens all the time, even without RSS. Why make legitimate users suffer because there are criminals?
3. Google is pretty good at determining spammy links. As an SEO, you should spend time disavowing spam backlinks.
Fight crime, not technology.
Got to say I disagree with most of your conclusions and while the RSS tech is outdated, there's generally cons and pros to any tool and feature. You seem to focus only on the potential negatives, when the truth is likely somewhere in between and in some cases might even be a positive for some sites. On top of that anyone that want to steal content for anything more "fake/real" would likely anyway be so selective that they'd create a custom scrape of the sites they steal from no matter there being RSS feeds available or not (almost anyone can do that as well).
You forgot about crawling budget, google always scan these pages, but not takes to index,
and if you look at log file ...