Before we get into the solution, it’s important to understand what RSS feeds are and why they matter. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s a technology that allows people to subscribe to a website’s content, so they can receive updates automatically. When you publish new content on your website, your RSS feed is updated automatically, and your subscribers receive a notification.
WordPress automatically generates RSS feeds for your website, including feeds for your categories. This means that your readers can subscribe to updates for a specific category of content, rather than receiving updates for all of your content. This is a useful feature because it allows readers to stay informed about the topics they care about most.
However, the downside of having category-specific RSS feeds is that Google sees those feeds as separate pages and warn you that the feed pages can’t be indexed.
How do you remove the WordPress feed on categories?
The solution is to add some code to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file. Here’s the code you need to add:
function sq_no_category_rss_feed()
{
global $wp;
$current_url = home_url(add_query_arg(array(), $wp->request));
if ($current_url <> home_url('feed')) {
wp_redirect(home_url() . str_replace('/feed','',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));
exit();
}
return true;
}
add_action('do_feed', 'sq_no_category_rss_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'sq_no_category_rss_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'sq_no_category_rss_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'sq_no_category_rss_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'sq_no_category_rss_feed', 1);
This code creates a function called sq_no_category_rss_feed that checks if the current page is a feed. If it is, the function then checks if the URL contains “/feed”. If it does, the function redirects the user to the same URL without the “/feed” at the end. This effectively removes the feed on categories and avoids the issue of Google Search Console showing these URLs as not indexed.
Once you have added this code to the functions.php file, save the file and upload it back to your WordPress installation. You should now be able to check your site in Google Search Console and see that the feed URLs on categories are no longer showing up as not indexed.
It’s important to note that removing the WordPress feed on categories is not ideal for all websites. If your site has a lot of content, and you cover a wide range of topics, then having category-specific RSS feeds can be very useful for your readers. In this case, you may want to leave the feeds as they are.
