by Dr. William Sen | Founder of blue media

Bad SEO: Avoid RSS Feeds on your Website

RSS feeds are a potential breeding ground for spammers

^{by Dr. William Sen}

Suppose you create a post “myseo.com/what-we-do”, using WordPress, it will automatically generate another copy with the extension “/feed.” resulting in “myseo.com/what-we-do/feed”. Many WordPress and even SEOs are oblivious of the fact that WordPress creates a copy of each post made.

Although most SEO experts may be aware of this, they do not readily pay attention, because they think Google turn a blind eye. Therefore, many SEO campaigns on WordPress are being run without acknowledging this issue. Unknown to many, this a major SEO issue.

If you’re using  WordPress, you have feeds implemented on your website without your say.

Automatic WordPress RSS Feeds – An SEO Debacle

Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, leave automatic generated susceptible content to feed readers.

Although subscribing to feeds used to be a common fad, it is almost redundant today as of 2024, because nearly no one utilizes them as practiced decades ago.

Let us run a quick check before we proceed, shall we? 

• Did you use an RSS feed reader recently?
• Is an RSS feed reader installed on your phone?
• Would you even remember if someone asked you what RSS stands for?

I am quite certain that you are not bent on remembering what RSS means as much as I am. Once we all knew that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The truth is, nobody cares about RSS anymore. RSS feeds have passed with time leaving one to wonder why these CMS still consider them useful, and advocate for users to keep them on their websites.

This notion is that RSS will hurt your SEO, and here’s why. And to further clarify, I will explain the negative effects of this practice by WordPress and other CMS that are feed-based, especially as it concerns your SEO.

The Negative Effects of Feeds for SEO

The only advocates nowadays for the use of feeds in the web space are content thieves. WordPress and other CMS that are feed-based inadvertently allow these people to steal your content easily. Allowing feeds on your website is an open invitation to copyright fraudsters who are always on the lookout to grab usable content. It is in fact an easy endeavor for them and does not necessarily require expertise, like programming something like Google’s web crawler. The ease is because feeds are usually written in XML; a machine-readable language that was developed by Tim Berners-Lee—rings a bell right? He invented the WWW which we all enjoy today. Berners-Lee’s dream was to make the entire web easily crawlable, which he invented. Unfortunately, making articles structured and properly arranged, makes it easy for content thieves to automatically read and reuse them on their own websites.

How Fraudsters Steal Web Content from Feeds

There are many undefined web directories and spam intended search engines, whose operational model borders around crawling websites automatically using their feeds.

You should be very concerned if your website has existed for a while providing valuable content with the feed feature intact. You cannot be too certain, but it is highly likely that your site is on the trail of these spam websites. The easiest ways for you to know this is when your images and texts are used as teasers on some dubious websites, such as domain review pages, press websites, etc. While this is huge copyright infringement in developed countries, most of these thieves care less about these laws because the laws of your country are not binding for them in most cases.

If you use RSS feeds for your website, there are very high chances that your content have been stolen already. If you are not sure about the status of your content, you are advised to run a quick query on Google to see just how much of your content has been duplicated.

These duplicates damage your SEO especially since most of these spammers add backlinks to your website either knowingly or unknowingly. As Google detects these websites as spam, their backlinks inadvertently affect your website’s ranking as well. You’re risking a manual action from Google as you’re getting backlinks from websites that have been flagged as spam websites. 

How to Stay Clear of  Spammers

Stop using feeds on your website.

This is the best advice for you. You are cutting off the supply of these spammers. WordPress and some of these CMS may not fully appropriate this feature so you may have to use third party solutions such as plugins to get it done for you. For WordPress, the most appropriate plugin would be the Disable Feed Plugin by Samir Shah (wordpress.org/plugins/disable-feeds), which ranks as one of one of the trusted plugins used so far in 2024. Spammers do not necessarily have the clout to build complex crawlers, which is why they feed off your website’s feed with intended pun. You can keep them away permanently from your content without limiting the impact of the big search engines who are not dependent on XML and feeds as they use sophisticated and highly developed crawlers.