WordPress generating “fake” /post-name/feed URLs for every article on my site

  • The other day I was checking my 404 error logs and noticed a large number of links to /<post-url>/feed/. I did some research and discovered that WordPress is actually outputting a “feed URL” page for every post on my site. This results in a LOT of “bad” URLs as search engines find and crawl these links to pages which don’t exist. For example the review for the Paris board game has this <link> tag on the page which returns a 404.

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Meeple Mountain &raquo; Paris Video Review Comments Feed" href="https://www.meeplemountain.com/reviews/paris-video-review/feed/" />

    I found an old post on Moz.com which mentioned this issue but the proposed fix in the article no longer valid. For additional context I almost exclusively use custom post types, with a handful of “pages”. The custom post types all exhibit this behavior, while the pages do no. However I just did a test to be thorough and “posts” also exhibit this behavior.

    Has anyone else run into this? If so, do you know how I can fix it? This problem is going to get bigger with every article we post to the site.

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Jan Dembowski.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Whatever you are using to declare the custom post type (plugin? or function?) needs to set ‘has_archive’ to false. What that link is trying to point at doesn’t exist on the single post so you will get a feed link pointing to a non-existent feed.

    The search engines follow that link and trigger the 404.

    Optionally, you might find the theme page for that custom post type has that hardcoded in the page and set to true… Set that to false in that theme pages header.

    Thread Starter commadelimited

    (@commadelimited)

    Thanks for the quick reply @jnashhawkins.

    I should have provided that info up front. I’m using CPT UI to declare the custom post types, and “has archive” is indeed set to True. The problem is that I need the archive page for each custom post type as a top level catch all.

    Using the specific URL I included in my post you can see that a review for the Paris board game:
    https://www.meeplemountain.com/reviews/paris-video-review/

    Rolls up to the reviews archive page:
    https://www.meeplemountain.com/reviews/

    The other post types are identical in expected behavior: news, articles, top-six, etc. They each have a distinct archive page.

    I am also seeing this issue. Had not been using CPUI until yesterday. These were happening before I had any custom post types on the site.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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