HowTo: Exclude Categories from RSS Feeds

rss feeds

A few days ago, I was thinking of excluding the Asides category from my RSS feed since this category is mostly about personal stuff and I also assume that most of the subscribers aren’t interested to read it. I did a little bit of research and found a way of excluding specific categories from RSS feeds.

HowTo: Exclude Categories from RSS Feeds

First thing you need to do is identify the ID of the category that you want to exclude from your feeds. You can do that by going to your Admin panel, then Manage > Categories and there you’ll see all the ID’s for the different categories. In my case, the category I want to exclude from my feed is the Asides category and it has 23 as it’s ID. Since I’m using Feedburner, I’ll have to edit the original feed source.

Original feed URL:
https://jaypeeonline.net/feed/

Edit feed URL to:
https://jaypeeonline.net/feed?cat=-23

Adding another category (Multiple categories):
https://jaypeeonline.net/feed/?cat=-1,-2

The last bit of data specifies which category or categories you want to exclude from the feed. You can exclude any category of your choice from your blog’s RSS feed and you can use this even if you’re not using Feedburner as this should work for any type of feed. I’m not 100% if this procedure works. If you decide to try it, any type of feedback or comments would be appreciated.

Also, I don’t think everyone has a need for this but hopefully it would be helpful to those who plan to exclude categories from their RSS feeds or have been looking for a way to do so.

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21 Comments

  1. Hi Thanks for sharing. I publish an email newsletter from RSS, created a directory and published a linked and sent out this stuff to my newsletter. Now I can exclude all the directory categories. It will be a few.

  2. Thank you for sharing this tip, it saved me a lot of work. While I was working on the “cat=” query I found out that the best way for excluding categories is to put all the categories comma separated.

    This is the way you suggest:
    https://jaypeeonline.net//feed?cat=-23&cat=-24

    This is the wordpress standard:
    https://jaypeeonline.net//feed?cat=-23,-24

    And, by the way, here‘s an explaination of how to find out the category’s id.

    Hope this comment helps.
    Bye.

  3. Jaypee, thanks for the reply. I have tried to exclude 3 categories… I didn’t work for me. Probably I did smth wrong. I have chosen another option – editing function.php file, as far as i remember.

  4. @Kolia – You’re welcome! How many categories do you want to exclude from your feed? It should work if you followed the format for adding categories. You also need to check if you got the category numbers right. Let me know if you’ve fixed it or if the format still doesn’t work. Thanks for sharing! :)

  5. Wooa… this is really easy. What a easy way to exclude pays entries from the feed. Thats cool. Thats really simple and cool.

    Thanks you very much for this information… its absolutely unneccessary to build any plugins, this is much easier as jhay mentioned ;)

  6. @Shari – I see, it’s good to know that it works.

    @jhay – I didn’t know that there was a plugin for this, anyways, it’s always good to have another option.

    @Dre – You’re welcome! Glad to know you found it useful. :D

  7. I think I came across a plugin once that controls which categories appear in your feeds. Forgot the details though, but your tips is as simple as opening the fridge. ;)

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