RSS is one of those technologies that are very simple yet much powerful. Optimize Your WordPress RSS Feed. Currently, RSS is the real model for blog syndication, and it is used broadly in both personal and corporate settings; for example, in websites/blogs. And because a huge percentage of these blogs work on WordPress, we’ll include in this post some practically useful RSS-related tricks and cabs that will help you use RSS in a more powerful way and without additional and stout WordPress plug-ins.
Why Optimize Your WordPress RSS Feed?
RSS feeds offer a way for your users to subscribe and view your blog posts in their preferred feed reader apps like Feedly. Even though feed users aren’t as common as they once were, there are still many users who favor reading WordPress blog content this way. By optimizing your RSS feed you can also stop content scraping, get more backlinks, send traffic to your site, and more. With that said, let’s get into our specialist tips for Optimize Your WordPress RSS Feed.
1. Protect RSS Feed From Scrapers
Content scraping is when content is taken from your website/blogs, normally via your RSS feed, and republished on other websites as their own. It can be very infuriating to see someone taking your content without your permission, monetizing it, and even exceeding your website in the search results. Happily, you can customize your RSS feed to really benefit your site if others steal your content via your RSS feed.
2. Create an RSS Feed Sitemap
RSS sitemap is modified from an XML sitemap. RSS sitemaps only hold your most up-to-date content, which helps Google to keep your content fresher in search results. If you publish content regularly, then this can lead to a boost in your search engine rankings.
All in One SEO, lets you add an RSS sitemap to your website quickly, without having to code.
The primary thing you need to do is install and activate the All in One SEO plugin. AIO SEO enables ** RSS sitemaps** automatically, so there’s nothing else you are required to do.
If you’d like to double-check, simply go to All in One SEO » Sitemap and then click on the ‘RSS Sitemap’ tab.
You can notice that the “Enable Sitemap” toggle option in the ‘RSS Sitemap’ box is now allowed.
Read More: 5 Tips To Optimize Your WordPress RSS Feed
Top comments (1)
Good points on scraper protection — adding a link back to the canonical source within the feed content is one of the more useful defenses, since scrapers end up inadvertently creating backlinks for you.
Worth adding one more use case to the "why optimize your RSS feed" list: cross-platform content syndication. A lot of WordPress site owners also run Shopify stores, and their RSS feed is the bridge between the two. A well-formed, complete feed (full content rather than excerpt, featured images included, proper category tags) makes it much easier to pull that content into their Shopify storefront without manual copy-paste.
I actually built WP Simple WordPress Feed (apps.shopify.com/simple-wordpress-post-feed) specifically for this — it reads a WordPress RSS feed and displays the posts inside a Shopify store. The quality of the feed directly affects how well it renders in the store, which is why the tips in this article matter beyond just feed readers.
Featured images in the feed (which you mention in a related post) make a real difference for how the content looks when surfaced elsewhere.
(Disclosure: I built the app.) The RSS format is one of those things that's been around so long developers underestimate how useful it still is.