What to Put in Your RSS Feed Footer (and What It Can Do Against Scrapers)

If you have ever searched for a sentence from one of your posts and found it on a site you have never heard of, word for word, there is a good chance it came through your RSS feed. Feeds exist so that readers' apps can fetch new posts automatically. The same convenience lets an automated site fetch them, strip the formatting and publish them as its own within minutes.

You cannot stop that with a feed setting. What you can do is make sure every automatic copy carries a link to the original, which is what a feed footer line is for. This post covers what the line does, how to word it, where it sits, and the other steps worth taking alongside it.

What a feed footer actually achieves

A feed footer is a sentence added to each post as it appears in the feed, not on your site. The standard one reads:

The post Cold Brew Ratios That Work appeared first on Brew Notes.

where the post title links to the post and the site name links to the homepage.

It does three useful things:

1. It survives lazy copying. Most autoblog software takes the post body as the feed delivers it. The line is part of that body, so it is published along with everything else.
2. It credits you to the copy's readers. Anyone who reads the copy sees where it came from and has a link to the original.
3. It links the copy to the original. When a search engine finds the copy, it finds a link from it to your post. That is evidence about which version came first, alongside when each page was discovered.

It does not stop a determined scraper. Software that strips links, rewrites text or drops the last paragraph will remove the line too. Think of it as attribution for the copies that would happen anyway.

How to word it

A footer line is read by three audiences: your real subscribers in feed readers, readers of copies on other sites, and search engines. Good lines serve all three.

Name the post and the site, both as links. The post link is the one that matters most for attribution. The site link gives a second path in and tells a reader of a copy that there is a whole site behind the post.

Keep it to one sentence. Your subscribers see it under every post. A paragraph of legal text gets old fast.

Say "first", if you can. "Appeared first on" or "originally published on" states plainly that your version is the original. It is the most useful word in the line.

Avoid threats. "This content is copyrighted and may not be reproduced" reads as hostile to your own subscribers and does nothing to a bot.

Some lines that work:

Before the post, after the post, or both?

After is the convention, and the right default. Feed readers show the start of each item as a preview, and your opening sentence is a better hook than a credit line.

Before has one advantage: copies that truncate posts, keeping only the first few hundred words, still keep a line at the top. If you know your posts are being copied in shortened form, a short line before ("By author for site") as well as the full line after covers both cases.

Full text or summary?

WordPress's Settings → Reading → For each post in a feed, include offers Full text or Excerpt. It matters more for scraping than any footer:

• Full text suits readers best. Subscribers can read the whole post in their app. It also hands a scraper the complete post.
• Excerpt sends only the start of each post, so a copy is a teaser with a link rather than a duplicate. Subscribers have to click through to read.

If copying has been a real problem, switching to excerpts removes most of the value a scraper gets. If your feed readers matter more to you than the occasional copy, keep full text and rely on the footer. Either way, a footer line still belongs on the excerpt, since that is what gets copied.

Other steps that help more than the footer

The footer handles attribution. These handle the ranking side, which is what actually costs you when a copy outranks your original:

• Get found first. Search engines tend to treat the earliest version they find as the source. Keep your XML sitemap up to date and, where you can, notify search engines as soon as a post is published, for instance with IndexNow for the engines that support it.
• Link between your own posts. Internal links in the post body are copied along with everything else, so a copy points back to your site in several places, not just the footer.
• Use absolute links. A relative link such as /guide/ turns into a link to the scraper's own domain once the text is copied. Full URLs keep pointing at you.
• Ask for removal when it costs you. If a copy ranks above your post, file a copyright removal request with the search engine, and contact the copy's host. That is slower, but it is the remedy that removes the page.

Setting it up in WordPress

In Hydrogen SEO 0.0.29 and later, open Hydrogen SEO → General → RSS Feed. There are two fields, Before each post and After each post, and a Preview in a feed reader that shows the result on a sample post.

The footer above is written as:

The post %post_link% appeared first on %site_link%.

%post_link% prints the post title as a link to the post, %site_link% the site name as a link to the homepage, and %author_link% the author's name as a link to their author page. Title variables such as %published% and %author_name% work as plain text, with their values escaped. The line goes into RSS and Atom feeds, in the full text and in the excerpt, and comment feeds are left alone. With both fields empty, which is the default, nothing is added. All the details are in RSS feed text.

To check it, open /feed/ on your site and search the page for a word from your line, clearing your caching plugin's cache first if it is not there. Then search for a distinctive sentence from your next post a week after publishing. If copies turn up, look for your link at the bottom of them.