Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
Michael Martinez: It doesn`t hurt anything and most if not all major SEO tools do that.It strikes me as yet another wasted effort intended to help sell SEO tools. Noindexing a URL doesn`t affect crawl budget but that seems to be the main selling point for this practice.
Neil Cheesman: I notice in GSC they are crawled and not indexed - so just leave them?
Michael Martinez: Neil Cheesman The search engines use these feeds for discovery. I know many (perhaps all) of the sites in our portfolio that use SEO plugins noindex these feeds by default, but it`s not something I would do willingly or intentionally. In fact, I`ve probably disabled the noindexing on some sites.I`m not a big fan of SEO plugins any more. They keep adding unnecessary bells and whistles and creating hysteria among Webmasters.
Neil Cheesman: Michael Martinez Thanks- I was more `concerned` about them being crawled and not indexed as they tend to clutter up seeing obvious urls that might not be getting indexed for whatever reason.
Richard Hearne: FWIW I turn off RSS feeds for comments and tags. Leave on for Categories, esp. for news sites (for Publisher Center and others who consume feeds). Otherwise, I simply ignore in GSC. It`s something that isn`t helpful in the GSC reporting IMO.
Neil Cheesman: Richard Hearne Out of interest - how do you turn them off?
Richard Hearne: Plugin. Cant say which one right now. You can also do it via a filter in functions.php. All assuming you`re on WP.
Neil Cheesman: Richard Hearne Yes on WP - The main problem I have with the feeds being listed is there are a lot and it makes it hard to see any anomalies of urls that are not getting indexed - most are but a few slip through.
Richard Hearne: The bigger the site, the more sense it makes to kill unwanted feeds IMO. Just wastes crawl budget etc. Hooks are available for this.
Re Wordpress sites - should RSS feeds be no-indexed?
