Does Size matter?
I received the question from a reader [I’m sorry I deleted your comment in error!] who asked is it best to provide a full or half RSS feed for your readers.
It’s a good question, and I think it all depends on if your blog is being syndicated by authority sites.
Full RSS Feed
Advantages – syndicated authority sites like USA Today, Washington Post etc want to publish your content, and they want the full feed, this is going to give you tons of new readers, and will increase traffic to your blog.
Disadvantages – some splogger will find your publishing your full RSS feed, so will create a blog on your niche, and literally scrape all of your posts on to their blog, and in return duplicating content which the likes of Google could filter out your blog posts from it’s search results.
Half RSS Feed
Advantages – if a splogger uses your RSS feed then they are only getting part of your content, which lowers the percentage of it being taken as duplicate content, and readers of your RSS feed, are more likely to come on to the blog if it’s a post that there are interested in reading, this increasing traffic.
Disadvantages – RSS readers won’t appreciate it that they only get part of your feed, and for some, this is enough to remove your feed from their preferred RSS reader. Personally, I don’t mind if it’s half of an RSS feed, as I’ll just click through and see if there are any other posts that I may have missed.
So there’s my opinion on full and half RSS feeds, what’s your opinion, does size matter?
Most Commented Posts
Filed under: Blogged Out on July 9th, 2007
I used to believe to only use an insert for rss but that was before my work put a net filter on which does not allow quite a lot of sites, so now if the blogs feeder is only ‘insert’ I cannot read their post. Ie an example was my websites rss (http://germworks.net) and also this site.
I hate looking at extract feeds in my reader, but I know why you do it, and I think thats why its important that your title is catchy to attract peoples attention, so they click through to the blog.
Jermayn / John,
Thanks for your comments.
If it wasn’t because of the sploggers, I’d open up full feed, but it’s easy for them to completely copy the content of my blog.
I know if they really wanted to they could do that anyway, but its more work, and most of these lowlifes, want an easy life to earn money.