What is the proper way to indicate that my site doesn't have an RSS feed?

Question

I have a website that is showing that there are attempts to access /rss in my server logs, but we don't have an RSS feed.

What is the best way to show that there is no RSS feed for my site? Should I use a blank page? A 404 error? In other words, is there a defined way to indicate there's: "No RSS here"

I'd like to remove the errors from the logs without just ignoring the issue.

Answer 1

It seems like you might have something like this on your site:

<link rel='alternate' type='application/rss+xml' title='RSS' href='http://example.com/rss'>

So search engines, RSS readers, etc... are attempting to access your /rss directory.

Answer 2

You could create a RSS XML page with static content indicating there is no feed available.

Something like this:

<rss version="2.0"
xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/">
<channel>
    <title>My Site</title>
    <atom:link href="http://domain.com/rss/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
    <link>http://domain.com</link>
    <description>...</description>
    <language>en-US</language>
    <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1</generator>
    <item>
        <title> No Feed is Available for Domain.com</title>
        <description> No Feed is Available for Domain.com </description>
        <link>http://domain.com</link>
    </item>
</channel>