RSS is on for my website.
I don’t syndicate content to any social media platform by RSS.
I have noticed that after I change a webpage, suddenly the viewing count rises in about 5 views in the first 5 minutes. From my knowledge of my customer base, it is unlikely to be customers but rather business competitors who try to track these changes, and that brought to my mind the thought about turning off RSS altogether.
Can turning off RSS cause SEO damage?
From what I understand RSS feeds don’t improve rankings, they only provide discovery for search engines. In other words, if a search engine comes across an RSS feed, it will use it to discover your pages and go index those rather than index the content in the feed itself.
So to answer your question, no it wouldn’t really cause SEO damage other than making it so that some of your content may not be discovered quite as fast.
However if you have an XML sitemap on your site, this can also help with getting your content discovered fast and can essentially replace the RSS for discovery. If you want to know more about that, I have a link for you below…
Hope that answers your question.
P.S. In the link they talk about RSS sitemaps which is different than an RSS feed of your content. Just so you are not confused. RSS sitemap is not your typical RSS feed for content.