Disable RSS feed

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  watchchuck · Member · Apr 12, 2010 at 9:34 pm

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  Hi,
  I’ve got a question about RSS feeds on wordpress.com:
  I don’t have any posts on my site only pages. So the RSS feed is always empty saying “Page not found”.
  Is there a way to deactivate the RSS feed completly or even better add the pages to the feed?
  Thanks

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  thesacredpath · Member · Apr 12, 2010 at 9:52 pm

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  Pages sit outside the blog structure so they cannot be included in the RSS feed, which is for posts only.

  Since the RSS feed link is not visible in the theme you are using, only people who know about RSS would think to even try to subscribe.

  The only way to disable the RSS feed is to set your blog to private, which means the general public would not be able to access it. They would have to be invited by you and then have a wordpress.COM account (not a blog just the username and password).

  First off I suggest you familiarize yourself with the differences between pages and posts (if you have not already): http://en.support.wordpress.com/post-vs-page/ .

  For some types of sites, pages may actually be the best way of presenting the material, but wordpress.COM is aimed at blogging and using pages for your content has drawbacks you need to be aware of:

  1. Pages will show up lower in search engine results because search engines place lower emphasis on pages. Pages are meant for static content that seldom if ever changes.

  2. When you publish a post, wordpress automatically “pings” all the major search engines to let them know you have published a new post so that they can index it. When you publish a page, wordpress does NOT “ping” the search engines. You will have to ping manually at a service such as pingomatic.com or wait for the search engines to find the page on their own when they make a scheduled crawl of your site.

  3. Only posts show up on an RSS feed, pages do not. That means people cannot subscribe to your blog so that they are alerted when you add something new.

  4. You can assign categories and tags to posts to help the search engines properly place you in search results. Pages cannot have tags or categories as they sit outside the blog structure which means your stuff will also not show up in the wordpress.COM global tags pages. For most people the global tags pages are responsible for bringing a lot of visitors to their blogs.