What are RSS feeds?
RSS means Real Simple Syndication. Basically this is a file (an XML or a JSON file usually) containing your latest content. People can easily subscribe to it, and by using feed readers, browse your content quickly and easily.
RSS feeds were very useful before the advent of social networks, with the popular Google Reader service.
By default WordPress generates a whole series of RSS feeds: posts, comments etc.
The two major disadvantages of RSS feeds are:
- the ease for malicious people to copy your content
- the reduction of your traffic and therefore of your conversions: the user remains in his RSS feed reader, and no longer visits your site.
Customize WordPress RSS feeds
With SEOPress PRO, you can add custom content before and / or after each post of your RSS feed.
To do that, go to SEO, PRO, RSS tab and enter your custom content using “Display content before each post” and “Display content after each post” textareas.
You can use these dynamic variables:
%%sitetitle%%,%%tagline%%,%%post_author%%,%%post_permalink%%,%%post_title%%
Use this hook to add your own custom dynamic variables for RSS feeds.
Display Excerpt only
WordPress also provides an option related to RSS feeds to let you choose between displaying the full content or just the excerpt for each post. Go to Settings, Reading settings page, “For each post in a feed, include” option to change this behavior. We strongly recommend you to choose Excerpt to prevent content scrapping. SEOPress also warns you from the SEO dashboard page about this.
Disable WordPress RSS feeds
Still from SEO, PRO, RSS tab, you can disable native WordPress RSS feeds by checking the available options below:
- Disable comments RSS feed
- Disable posts RSS feed
- Disable extra RSS feed (author, categories, custom taxonomies, custom post type, comments feed for a single post)
- Disable all RSS feeds
The first three options remove the link from the source code. The last one, completely disable the RSS feature and redirect the user to the homepage.
