Note: disabling RSS feed may disable your auto social media share if you are using Google FeedBurner, Google News publishing and any other feed readers and your users may not be able to subscribe to particular feeds if you want them to do so.
Why we wanted to disable RSS Feeds ?
When we analysed our website as submitted to Google Webmaster, webmaster showed that there are lot of links which got crowled by google search bot but didn’t got indexed for search. When we analysed it showed that most of the links which google skipped was feed’s which are not directly visible to the users in search hence its expected that Google Skips its indexing. ( As shown in below image )
How to disable RSS Feeds ?
Login to your wordpress Admin dashboard, and from “Plugins” -> “Add New” Search for “Disable Feeds” plugin, you may refer to this link.
Install this plugin and then you can decide to what you wan to do with the feed link, as when the Disable Feeds plugin is active, By default, all feeds are disabled, and all requests for feeds are redirected to the corresponding HTML content. OR you can choose to select page not found and return with 404 error.
Go to “Settings->Reading” and select the appropriate option as below,
I want to disable it but what’s the implications and how does that affect my traffic…
I managed to disable it… My traffic improved… I enabled it again, my traffic got worse… What’s the reason behind this because some people are copying my contents via the feeds
Another problem is if the feeds is disabled, it takes several hours before my posts get indexed on Google.
Why?
Is there a way that we can disable it for other websites to avoid scrapping and do not block for search engines, like Google.