In your WordPress websites, sometimes you accidentally enable feeds and feed pages, often by accident or by default by whatever WordPress SEO plugin you are using. By design, these plugins sometimes set this by default. The issue now is that Google Search can crawl and try to index these. Due to the content structure and markups of these feeds, Google Search Console (GSC) will often flag and report these as "Crawled - currently not indexed". This is because Google Search identifies these feed pages as information that is not as valuable and relevant as web pages as search results.

In GSC, you will see a list of feed URLs, whether feeds for WordPress tags, and/or feeds for your WordPress posts. In GSC, these errors can be a lot if feeds are enabled, and yet not needed, or of no value for Google Search or SEO!

Examples to illustrate the error and a sample of a feed page.

Understanding "Crawled - Currently Not Indexed"

This status indicates that Google has crawled the URL but decided not to index it. This could happen due to:

1. Quality Issues: The content might be considered low quality, thin, or duplicate.
2. Canonicalization: Google might have identified another page as a better or canonical version.
3. Technical Issues: There could be technical problems such as incorrect HTTP responses or crawling issues.

In these case, feeds or feed pages itself are not a search result material and thus being flagged by GSC as it is crawled and yet provides no value.

Guide Questions

1. Do you really need your webpages to be presented or served with feeds (aggregation/syndication)?
2. If not, what can we do to disable the feeds or the feed version of the webpages?

Why WordPress feed pages can pose an SEO issue, and are errors in GSC

Technically speaking, feed pages by structure, purpose, and content oftentimes provides:

1. Thin Content: Feed pages often contain summaries or excerpts that Google might consider as low-value content.
2. Duplicate Content: Feed pages duplicate the content found on your main blog posts, leading Google Search bots and algorithm confused as to priority and validity of the pages. See for instance screenshot below, which can provide duplicate title tags for both the content webpage and the feed page version
3. Canonical Tags: Google might treat the feed pages pages as canonical over the the main content or webpage .
4. Meta Robots Tag: Feed pages might have index tags, instructing Google to index them, and possible show these on Google Search.
    

   

How to disable feeds in WordPress websites to prevent Google Search from indexing feeds

To disable feeds in WordPress websites and prevent Google from indexing them, you can use popular SEO plugins like RankMath, Yoast SEO, and All in One SEO. Below are the steps for each plugin:

RankMath

Additional reference from RankMath forum post.

1. Install and Activate RankMath:

   • Go to your WordPress dashboard.
   • Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
   • Search for "RankMath", install, and activate it.

2. Disable RSS Feeds and Set Noindex for Feeds:

   • Login to WordPress Dashboard
   • Navigate to Rank Math SEO → Titles & Meta → Misc Pages
   • Look for the option called Noindex Paginated Single Pages
   • Enable this option to prevent feed URLs like /feed/ from appearing in search results

3. Save Changes:

   • Click the "Save Changes" button to apply the settings.

Yoast SEO

1. Install and Activate Yoast SEO:

   • Go to your WordPress dashboard.
   • Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
   • Search for "Yoast SEO", install, and activate it.

2. Disable RSS Feeds:

   • Yoast does not have a direct setting to disable RSS feeds, so you need to add custom code to your theme’s functions.php file. Add the following code to disable RSS feeds:
     
     function disable_feeds() { wp_redirect(site_url()); exit; } add_action('do_feed', 'disable_feeds', 1); add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'disable_feeds', 1); add_action('do_feed_rss', 'disable_feeds', 1); add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'disable_feeds', 1); add_action('do_feed_atom', 'disable_feeds', 1); add_action('do_feed_rss2_comments', 'disable_feeds', 1); add_action('do_feed_atom_comments', 'disable_feeds', 1);

3. Set Noindex for Feeds:

   • Go to SEO > Search Appearance.
   • Click on the "Archives" tab.
   • Scroll down to the "RSS Feeds" section and set it to noindex.
   • Save changes.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

1. Install and Activate AIOSEO:

   • Go to your WordPress dashboard.
   • Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
   • Search for "All in One SEO", install, and activate it.

2. Disable RSS Feeds:

   • Go to All in One SEO > General Settings.
   • Click on the "RSS Content" tab.
   • Add content or redirects if necessary, but this plugin does not have a direct setting to disable feeds. For full disabling, you might need custom code similar to the one used in Yoast.

3. Set Noindex for Feeds:

   • Go to All in One SEO > Search Appearance.
   • Click on the "Archives" tab.
   • Set the "RSS Feeds" section to noindex.
   • Save changes.

Additional/Optional Steps

1. Check for settings, if there are any, to disable indexing of feed pages, e.g. set to noindex, nofollow 

2. Regardless of the plugin, ensure that your robots.txt file disallows feed URLs to reinforce the noindex directive. Add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /feed/
   Disallow: /comments/feed/
   
   

Feeds are now disabled, what now?

1. Go to Google Search Console
2. Go to the error report page for Page indexing, Crawled - currently not indexed
3. Document the number of affected pages, this way to determine later if fixes and resubmission for validation has been successful
4. Done fixing? Click on VALIDATE FIX, see screenshots for first time "Not Started", and for previously submitted and "Validation failed"
5. Monitor after a few days or after being notified by email validation is finished, whether successful or failed.

These steps for each SEO plugin will help you can disable RSS feeds and prevent Google from indexing them. This ensures your main content remains the focus for search engines and improve your SEO efforts and initiatives.