What is an RSS feed?

What a feed contains

<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Example Roasters</title>
    <link>https://example.com/</link>
    <item>
      <title>Pour-over coffee guide</title>
      <link>https://example.com/pour-over-coffee-guide/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Nov 2026 09:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <description>Ratios, grind size and timing for a clean cup.</description>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Atom is a second format that does the same job. WordPress serves both.

Feed addresses in WordPress

WordPress announces the main ones in each page's head so that readers can find them:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Example Roasters » Feed" href="https://example.com/feed/" />

Two options under Settings → Reading control the content: Syndication feeds show the most recent sets the number of items, 10 by default, and For each post in a feed, include switches between full text and excerpt.

How feeds touch SEO

Discovery. Google accepts RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds as a sitemap format, and a feed's short list of the newest URLs is a quick signal of what was just published. It complements an XML sitemap, which lists everything. Feeds also power the follow feature in some browsers and many third-party apps.

Extra URLs to crawl. The table above adds up. On a site with 2,000 posts, per-post comment feeds alone are 2,000 more addresses, nearly all empty. Crawlers find them through the <link> tags and fetch them. That is seldom harmful, but on large sites it is crawl activity with no return.

Scraping. Automated copy sites read /feed/ and republish each item as it arrives. A full-text feed hands them the whole article. Search engines usually identify the original, yet a copy can occasionally be crawled first.

Feeds in the index. Feed URLs rarely appear as search results, since they are XML and not pages. You do not normally need to block or noindex them.

Sensible settings

• Switch to excerpts if scraping is a problem and you have few feed-reader subscribers. Readers then click through, and copies contain only a summary.
• Add a credit line to each item. A sentence linking back to the original post travels with the content when it is copied. Hydrogen SEO's RSS feed text setting adds a line before or after each item, with variables for the post link and site link. The reasoning is in what to put in your RSS feed footer.
• Trim feeds nobody uses. If comments are off or rarely used, the comment feeds serve no one. The crawl cleanup switches remove the links to comment, archive and search feeds from the head, and can turn off comment and search feeds so they redirect to the page they belong to.
• Leave /feed/ alone. Disabling the main feed breaks newsletter automations, podcast directories and readers that depend on it, for no SEO gain.

Checking your feed

Open /feed/ in a browser. You should see XML, or a formatted view of it, listing your latest posts with correct absolute links on the final https hostname. Errors here usually come from stray output before the XML declaration, such as a blank line at the top of a theme or plugin file, which makes the feed invalid for strict parsers.

If you submit the feed as a sitemap in Search Console, check the Sitemaps report afterwards for the number of discovered URLs. It will only ever show the latest few, which is expected.