RSS feed links

[ThridHour]

Is this an RSS feed link? How was this page generated?

http://blog.moregoodfoundation.org/category/technology/feed

What causes it to show up as a backlink in open site explorer? And how would you go about removing these links? Lots of questions there

Thank you.

[ThridHour]

Thanks Paul, I'm more curious about how and why these links are created.

[ThompsonPaul]

Unless you have a very specific reason for not wanting the feeds available, there's really no reason worry about removing them, moregood. They're not visible to normal visitors unless they use their own feed reader software to subscribe to the feed. If you're concerned about the full content of each post being available, you can go to Settings -> Read in your Dashboard and select Summary instead of Full Text.

If you do want to remove the RSS Feed links from the page entirely, you'll need to add some code to your theme's functions.php file. To do this properly, you'll need to create a child theme and edit the functions file there - otherwise each time you upgrade your customisation will be overwritten and you'll have to redo it.

The code to add in order to remove the additional RSS feeds is:

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );

Note thought that this just removes the links for the page code, it doesn't stop WordPress from generating the feeds. Doing that requires more hacking than I'm prepared to cover here.

Bottom line: there's no reason to worry about these extra feeds or their incoming links. They may be useful to a few users, and for the others, they'll be "out-of-site, out-of-mind". I'd consider just about any other SEO opportunities to be higher priority than worrying about these.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[ThridHour]

That feed url link is coming from my own site but I'm not sure how it was created and/or how to delete them. Any ideas?

[ThompsonPaul]

Yup, that's an RSS feed, moregood. By default, WordPress creates a number of specialised feeds in addition to the basic site feed. These include feeds for Categories, Post Comments, Tags, and Authors.

I'm not clear from your question if this feed lives on your own site or someone elses? If it's on someone else's site, its a perfectly legitimate backlink. Some sites choose to allow their feeds to be indexed by search engines to aid in indexing of their pages. There's no reason or need to remove these links from your backlinks unless they're from a spammy site. This link is just showing that one of the posts in that category feed has a link to your site. You'll probably also have a backlink showing from a regular page on that site as well.

Does that answer your question? Or is that link coming from your won site and you're wondering how to remove those special RSS feeds from your own site?

Paul

Paul

[ThridHour]

Weird, I can't figure it out either which is why I'm here

I'm using Open Site Explorer for the backlink report.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

A feed is generated from the content of a your website. As for why this link is showing, when it isn't there is a little odd. Saying that, I did have a similar problem about 2 years ago and can't think what it was for the life of me!

What were you using to generate the backlink report?

-Andy

[ThridHour]

Okay thanks, what about a feed url like this one? http://ldsimages.com/category/uncategorized/feed. Open site explorer is showing it as linking to this site; mormonbeliefs.org, with [No Anchor Text]. How is that link being generated?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Yes, it is an RSS feed and all blogs have them (im sure they can be disabled) - normally at the same address /feed or /rss.

I am guessing that you have links in your articles back to your primary site? As the blog is on a subdomain, it will be seen as a separate site and links back will be seen... If I understood correctly

-Andy