There’s several reason’s you’ll benefit from delaying your RSS from being available to the world. Let’s take a look at the benefits of slowing down your RSS feed then I’ll show you how to delay it with wordpress’s function.php file.
Top reason’s you need to delay your RSS Feed:
- Syndication source confusion can occur when you allow a website to redistribute your content (usually via RSS) and your syndicated content ends up rankings on their website, not yours.
- Content thief’s – some webmaster is stealing your content as soon as you publish it and posting it online. If said website is ranked higher than yours, your article could get ranked on their website instead of yours.
- Error delay – delay your post from auto posting to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This gives you time to correct any errors that may occur after publishing.
- Instant social media publishing delay so you tweet it yourself or something like that? I don’t know, I’m obviously reaching for reasons!
Here’s how to delay your WordPress RSS feed. Copy and paste the code below into your themes functions.php file. I usually do so at the bottom of the file.
[code]
<pre><?php function Delay_RSS_After_Publish($where) { global $wpdb; if (is_feed()) { $now = gmdate(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’); $wait = ’60’; $device = ‘MINUTE’; $where.=" AND TIMESTAMPDIFF($device, $wpdb->posts.post_date_gmt, ‘$now’) > $wait ";
}
return $where;
}
add_filter(‘posts_where’, ‘Delay_RSS_After_Publish’);
?>[/code]
Currently this script is configured to delay the RSS feed until 60 minutes after you publish the article. You can adjust the amount of time the feed waits until updating by modifying the $wait = ’60’; variable.
Now that you know how to delay your feed after publishing in wordpress, let’s look at why those several reasons are important.
- Syndication source confusion – if you have sites that syndicate your content it’s highly possible that google will mistakenly index your content on their website. This means the syndication site will rank for your content before you will. This is especially harmful if you’re a news based website.
- Content thief’s – same as above, just you didn’t approve these folks from jacking you. So by delaying your RSS feed you give the search engines a chance to index your content before it gets jacked!
- Error delay – Another good reason to delay the feed is to give you a chance to correct error before the entire world is updated via your RSS feed.
- Instant social media publishing delay – Lots of folks us automated tools to publish their post to their social networks. These tools usually pull in your blog content via RSS. I like to delay my auto-posting so it looks more natural.