RSS feeds

I am not sure if this is a Yoast issue but because Yoast has some association with sitemaps I thought I would ask here.

I noticed recently that Googlebot seems to be visiting a site I manage – it is visiting the site at a rate of hundreds of thousands of times a day! Most of these visits seem to be to the auto generated rss feeds that WordPress seems to create. However it is concatenating some parameters onto the end of the url –

i.e.:

/category/news/feed/?page_number_2=6&page_number_4=6&page_number_5=3

Thereby making the urls unique. The parameters on the end are usually longer than the above example but there appears to be literally hundreds of the urls all slightly different and to various different categories and authors!

I can not find any of these urls in the sitemaps generated by Yoast but also do not believe that there are any other plugins or functions generating sitemaps with or without the aforementioned rss feeds. I can not even find the feeds without the parameters listed in the sitemaps generated by Yoast.

These visits were not happening until recently. From what I can see this has been happening the last 2 weeks. No changes were made to Yoast or to any plugins that I know of.

The IP addresses of the robots visiting the site seem to be legitimate Google IPs. I can’t understand either why Google is wasting its own bandwidth visiting urls that are all almost identical.

The above is chewing through bandwidth at a rate of knots!

Any help or suggestion as to why this may be happening would be most appreciated.

Thank you.

• This topic was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by danMWD.