RSS feed stopped providing content

I was passed an issue whereby RSS feeds had "stopped working" for an Internet facing website. On closer inspection I found that the web site was using feedburner to provide their feeds. After getting the details from feedburner I was able to work out that the SharePoint feed was coming from:

http://www.website.com/_layouts/feed.aspx?xsl=1&web=/news&page=xxxxxxxx-yyyy-zzzz-qqqq-wwwwwwwwwwww&wp=xxxxxxxx-yyyy-zzzz-qqqq-wwwwwwwwwwww

I called this page and surprise surprise it returned blank - feeds not working.

Looking at the query string for the requested page suggested the following:

• The feed related to the '/news' site.
• The feed related to a specific page denoted by the guid.
• The feed related to a specific web part denoted by the guid.

After navigating to the '/news' sub site, I was able to see that there was only one page and on this page there was a content Query web part which was RSS enabled. This web part was not returning any results within the page. When I clicked on the RSS link I was taken to the same URL referenced by the feedburner so I had worked out where the RSS content was coming from.

I edited the web part and found that it was pointing that a sub site which no longer existed. Ergo, no results were displayed and therefore there was no rss content for feedburner to index.

After the CQWP was reconfigured to pull content from a site which existed, the RSS feed populated itself and everyone was able to get on with their lives. :)

Very simple really.