Every time I create a new post or page using WP, the post or page is automatically duplicated in an RSS feed – for example wppov.com/mynewpost/feed. It isn’t exactly an evil twin, just antiquated and – by 2023 standards – more troublesome than useful.
RSS feeds were popular and useful a decade or two ago, but not so much in 2023. These days feeds are more likely used for content scraping, data mining, and spamming. No thanks, I’d rather block this bad behavior.
Unfortunately, WP does not provide a way to turn off RSS feeds. Just another example of the PIC at WP deciding on their own what’s best for me rather than allowing me to decide for myself.
The most common way to block RSS feeds from WP seems to be using the Disable Feed Plugin by Samir Shah. However, the plugin hasn’t been updated or maybe even tested with new WP versions for over five years, and I already have too many plugins as it is.
So, I’ll try using a Cloudflare custom firewall rule:
And it seems to be working. As soon as I activated the rule my firewall log began to show naughty bots being blocked from accessing my feeds.
Sitemaps are also less useful than they were a decade or two ago. Opinions are mixed on whether sitemaps are still a good practice for search engine optimization – which is their intent – but there seems to be no downside, so it still makes sense to me to provide sitemaps for search engine consumption. Access to sitemaps by non-search-engine bots and users seems suspicious to me – so I’ll block it.
My first firewall rule white-lists search-engine bots, so I can block access by other bots and users without impacting any SEO value. The CFW rule is the similar to the one illustrated above, just with “/feed” replaced by “/sitemap”.
