Disable RSS feed or remove RSS feeds from Search Engines

Hi Cursor,

You have to find all the places on your site that generates feeds and list them. You cannot as you discovered use kind-of-wildcards.

Xenu links checker displays all the urls generated by your site.

one to block is
Disallow: /node/feed
another is
Disallow: /blog/feed

It would also be advised that you exclude archive, if you use archive or else a search engine might get trapped on the site.
I just ran xenu links checker and it went back to 1999 although I just started my homepage this week.

Disallow: /archive

You can find Xenu links checker here and it´s free:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

If you don´t wan´t a specific search engine to index, list that engine before the default supplied from drupal http://drupal.org/node/22265 :

I don´t know if Googlebot can filter sub directories (e.g. Disallow : /feed/), but currently this does seem to matter regarding rank in google

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /node/feed
Disallow: /blog/feed
Disallow: /aggregator/sources
Disallow: /tracker
Disallow: /comment/reply
Disallow: /node/add
Disallow: /user
Disallow: /files
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /book/print
Disallow: /archive
Disallow: /trackback

User-agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 10
Disallow: /aggregator/sources
Disallow: /tracker
Disallow: /comment/reply
Disallow: /node/add
Disallow: /user
Disallow: /files
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /book/print
Disallow: /archive
Disallow: /trackback

You should be aware that inktomi (Yahoo) recently bought http://blo.gs and inktomi automatically injects your feed to that page.

links:
robots.txt checker
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi

misconfigurations in robots.txt
http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/robots_txt_crawl.htm

The way I did it for my personal site is to hack the Node module.

Find node.module, edit it, then look for the line

function node_feed($nodes = 0, $channel = array()) {

and insert the following two lines just below:

  drupal_not_found();
  return;

Basically it returns a 404 error indicating to search engines and other things that will take in the RSS feed that it's unavailable (either temporarily or permanently). I've only tested this with 4.5, but should work in 4.6. Note that every time you upgrade your Drupal install, you'll have to make the changes again. Ideally there should be some permissions around accessing feeds, to make it a little more flexible for site administrators.

I killed the RSS Feeds on my site by hacking one of the includes as follows:

common.inc found in the includes folder.

There are two functions to comment out ie. /* content to be commented out */

function format_rss_channel (which formats a RSS channel)
Comment out lines 692 - 708

function format_rss_item (which formats a RSS item)
Comment out lines lines 715 - 743

Once these are commented out (or deleted) ALL feeds will be blank.

Silent as the grave.....

I used the hack common.inc method which seems to work great at disabling the rss function. However, I am still showing the xml button on every taxonomy page that I have. Here is an example:

http://www.freeonlineresearchpapers.com/taxonomy/term/34

(you will have to scroll to the bottom)

Any ideas on how to remove this from the theme all together?

Thanks for any advise!

Hi,

please, can you explain me:

why do you want stop Drupal generating a RSS Feed?
why you don't want the search engines to index the RSS Feed?

With these Features I got far more traffic and better search engine results on my web pages.

--
go with us

You can hack your theme and put virtually anything as the XML icon. No need to change Drupal code, as it's too dangerous.

Just override theme_xml_icon($url). For instance, in PHPTemplate you can create a template.php file an put the following to remove the XML link/icon completely:

function phptemplate_xml_icon($url)
{
        return '';
}

Notice that no link == search engine spider can't find feed pages (unless someone links to them on other websites, of course). This is a simple, hackless way of turning off RSS feeds in Drupal that is working nice for me.

Flávio Veloso
Nacional Digital

I was asking myself the same question this morning. Glad to see it here.

Shouldn't the legit SEs respect the rel="nofollow" attribute? So if you have that in all your /feed links, wouldn't that solve the issue?

It seems like that would give the best of both worlds for people who would want to offer feeds but don't want a duplicate content penalty in the SEs.

BTW, if drupal served up feeds with the correct mime type (application/rss+xml) the SEs would ignore this entirely. Unfortunately, FF and IE would ask you if you want to download the file, so you wouldn't be able to check the feed easily in your browser). Not sure if that's still true with FF 1.5

So I've done this in /themes/theme_name/template.php

function theme_name_xml_icon($url)
{
  if ($image = theme('image', 'misc/xml.png', t('XML feed'), t('XML feed'))) {
    return '<div class="xml-icon"><a href="/'. check_url($url) .'" rel="nofollow">'. $image. '</a></div>';
  }

}

Obviously, in the file name and the function name, replace "theme_name" with the name of your theme that gets the nofollow attribute.

Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)

I found a website stealing all my recent content using my RSS (my website is a poetry forum).

My users aren't happy at all with this... :(

Miguel Duarte

Webmaster of: Lisbon Guide & Love Poems

I know, naive question.

I have a 4.6 site that is password protected, with no unauthenticated users allowed. I don't want any bot to index my site, nor steal my RSS, nor take my lunch money.

I have pointed google at my site and found nothing, but I suspect that means very little. Do I need to take action??

Thanks in advance.

I can't seem to find in any of the css files where I can disable RSS/XML. I run a private website and require users to be logged in to view any and all content, making drupal generated RSS feeds unusable.

I just want to remove the XML icon from being displayed or whatever it takes to remove the feed feature completely. I have manually created a public RSS feed and wish not to confuse our subscribers with more links.

So in summary, I would like to be able to do the following:

TURN OFF ALL DRUPAL GENERATED FEEDS (useless unless user is logged in, feed readers do not know how to log in)

PREVENT XML ICON FROM BEING DISPLAYED

I do not want to use additional modules in order to disable something that should be a module.

Version 4.6

Any help would be very greatly appreciated ;)

To disable RSS logos both in the address bar and on pages in Drupal 5.1 :

Edit theme.inc to disable feed icons

function theme_feed_icon($url) {
//  if ($image = theme('image', 'misc/feed.png', t('Syndicate content'), t('Syndicate content'))) {
//    return '<a href="'. check_url($url) .'" class="feed-icon">'. $image. '</a>';
//  }
}

AND also edit common.inc

function drupal_add_feed($url = NULL, $title = '') {
  static $stored_feed_links = array();

/*  if (!is_null($url)) {
    $stored_feed_links[$url] = theme('feed_icon', $url);

    drupal_add_link(array('rel' => 'alternate',
                          'type' => 'application/rss+xml',
                          'title' => $title,
                          'href' => $url));
  }*/
  return $stored_feed_links;
}

I'm new to Drupal, and I can't help but wonder:

This thread started in '05.

Disable RSS still isn't incorporated as a feature?

What gives??

in common.inc after this line:
function drupal_add_feed($url = NULL, $title = '') {

put this:
return array();

I'm trying to create some consolidate RSS feed.

I have a site with "normal" posts and a blog to fast tips & tricks. How can I merge all posts (site and blog) on just one RSS? Any idea?

Thanks!
Paulino

You can use views.module to get the trick done: you mask the page using a view, delete the node feed argument, and voila no rss without changing a line of code.
but that does most of the job, there is still the yoursite.tld/rss.xml which can be accessed by simply typing the address, there are many ways to get around this, the easiest way is to use the path_redirect.module to make a permanent redirection from the rss.xml page to your frontpage, for example.
And you might want to use the robots.txt file to block search engines from trying to access the page.

This way, you have 'no rss' with 'no dirty hacks'.

I am using Drupal 5.7 and I resorted to this:

system.module: function system_rss_feeds_settings()

Just update the line that reads
'#options' => drupal_map_assoc(array(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30)),
to
'#options' => drupal_map_assoc(array(0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30)),

Note the added first value: zero

After that, go to Administer > Content management > RSS publishing and select the Number of items per feed: 0 option.

I haven't tried the other tips to hide the feed's icon, but killing the feed's content is what matters the most at this time...

Seriously thought, something permanent should be done. I agree having RSS as an option (disabled / enabled + settings) is the right way.

Ref. this issue:
"Add permissions to disable RSS feeds"
http://drupal.org/node/28337

I added the directive below to my .htaccess file to redirect the blog feed back to the blog…

RedirectMatch /blog/feed /?q=blog

Pros:

Takes effect immediately, easy to manage, you can redirect any feed to any page or all feeds to a specific page…

Cons:

Need write access to the server, Redirect does not show Clean URL, Not easy to troubleshoot if an unfamiliar admin needs to remove this setting…

I would only recommend this method if you are certain you will be able to effectivly document it so that there will be no issues disabling if the need should arise

http://library.acquia.com/content/turning-or-hiding-rss-drupal-6

I'm just about to try this out, but I'm sure it will work.

Update: This eliminates all of the feeds, but does not remove the icons on the pages, or in the address bar.

There is now a module to disable RSS Permissions: http://drupal.org/project/rss_permissions

Search in page.tpl.php print $feed_icons; and change in to //print $feed_icons;
that it ....

There is a file named feed.png at /public_html/misc folder. Rename this file to back_up_feed.png. This will will cause the RSS icon to disappear from your pages!

In case you wish to restore the icon at a later stage, you can always rename back_up_feed.png to feed.png

Anand

This worked for me but I only needed to remove the link in the source code:

function ninetystrong_html_head_alter(&$head_elements) {
unset($head_elements['drupal_add_html_head_link:alternate:http://www.YOURSITENAME.com/rss.xml']);
}

see also https://www.drupal.org/node/944476