Excluding Sponsored Posts From Feeds
Jul 9, 2008 Blogging, Tutorials
A while ago I wrote about boring your readers with sponsored posts, what a bad idea it was, and how to prevent it. Well, here is something else you can do to save your visitors on having to read about lawyers in Delaware again.
I’ve recently created a new category just for sponsored posts. To abide by the rules set down by advertisers, the category no way suggests that these posts are sponsored or being paid for. If anything it suggests that they suck and don’t deserve to see day light, hence why I called mine “basement“. You can names yours anything you want, so long as it doesn’t suggest that you’re receiving monetary payments in return. Name yours “little bunny froo froo” for all I care, but just dump all your boring boring posts in that one category.
Now I know many of you, including myself, give readers the option to subscribe to our blogs using rss feeds. The last thing you want is for your monotone posts about oven gloves to end up in their inboxes or on their feed readers. Yes, it’s unfortunate that those even have to be on our blogs (hopefully the idea of raking in some cash is of comfort to you, or else God knows why you’re still doing it), but at least we can make our feed subscriber’s life easier by removing sponsored posts from our feeds. There are 2 ways:
- If you use feedburner, simply change your feed url to
http://domain.com/feed?cat=-n, the n being the category you wish to exclude (you can find the number through wordpress). If you wish to exclude more than one category, usehttp://domain.com/feed?cat=-x,-y,-z, where x, y, and z represent the categories you wish to exclude.
- You can use plugins. The Ultimate Category Excluder does just what it says, and some more. However, compatibility with Wordpress 2.1+ is uncertain. Stealth Publish allows you to exclude posts instead of entire categories, so check that out if that’s your thing.
I personally prefer method #1, just because it’s very easy to do and takes less than a minute to complete. I’ve already configured my feeds to exclude sponsored posts. Yay! 
July 10th, 2008 at 5:22 am
Oooh a great idea! I am going to call mine attic. =)) Haha!
July 10th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
To Regina: I thought of using attic too! But then basement suited me more because that is exactly what we use our basement for: storing junk!
July 18th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
[...] them. However, unlike previous methods when you simply tried to bump down your sponsored posts or exclude them from your feeds, this method might cause you to break the advertiser’s rules. So make sure you double check [...]
August 18th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Hi Mimi
I am trying to create a new rss feed for my wordpress category called podcasts which I will submit then to itunes
Iam still a little confusesd
Do I call new feed http://example.com/category/podcasts/feed and then submit it to feedburner for validation?
thnaks
mike
September 11th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
@Mike Kelly: The feed url for the posts in your podcasts category would be http://example.com/podcasts/feed
Hope this helps!
September 25th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
[...] ugly paid posts in the rss feed.
I tried to exclude multiple categories but the code I mentioned here didn’t work, and I was flipping out at the sight of those hideous posts. Luckily, I managed [...]
October 16th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Heyy I changed my feedburner URL to the one you wrote above, excluding my category but it doesn’t work? =(
December 4th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
@ Katy:
Wow, this is only about 2 months late, but it might be because of your Wordpress version. Check out http://perishablepress.com/press/2008/06/11/3-ways-to-exclude-content-from-wordpress-feeds/#comment-67915
for more information.