Comments on: Full or Partial RSS Feeds?

By: Ventibate

Ventibate — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:12:47 +0000

It seems to me that everyone that replied that they prefer full feeds was speaking as a reader and not a blogger. I realize that some people have an aversion to anyone making money on the Internet but for most of us serious bloggers, we do hope to make some money at this. If we provide the full feed, sure it makes it nice for you readers, but we lose money if enough of you read everything in a feed reader and if we lose enough money we stop blogging and then you will have less to read.

Speaking as a blogger, I don’t care about scraping, I make my decision to offer partial feeds because I want visitors to my site. I don’t need to feed my ego with a huge reader count, I need to feed my family.

By: redwall_hp

redwall_hp — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:56:32 +0000

@Tom Shine, technically they were called feed aggregators first, but I won’t argue with your logic.

@kristarella, A lot of bloggers put copyright notices in their feeds. I do, and Lorelle Van Fossen does, for example.

The plugin I mentioned in my last comment (Feed Footer) can be found here, by the way: http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/feed-footer-plugin/ There are other plugins that work similarly, but I haven’t looked actively.

By: kristarella

kristarella — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:57:53 +0000

That’s a cool idea to put a notice at the bottom of your feed – definitely worth while to offer full feeds.

By: Tom Stine

Tom Stine — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 20:24:16 +0000

Just an FYI: if I subscribe to a feed and find that it is partial, I unsubscribe immediately. It’s called a feed READER, and I read blog posts in it. :-)

By: redwall_hp

redwall_hp — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:05:37 +0000

Offer a full feed. Many people will only subscribe to a full feed. Some RSS readers, for the smaller amount of people who prefer summaries, offer the ability to truncate feed items, so you needn’t clutter your template with partial feed links. To combat scrapers, use the Feed Footer plugin for WordPress to add a copyright notice and a link back to your blog. That way the feed scrapers will grab the notice as well. Readers will see the notice, and Technorati will hopefully pick-up on the link, so the scraper site will show on your Dashboard.

By: Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:57:48 +0000

When you tell your users that you have full feeds the chances of them subscribing to your blog is higher because they can just read your blog at the night in the email, but when it is partial feed most won’t subscribe, and those who do only do it for notification purposes.

One major disadvantage other than the duplicate content issue that Darren mentioned is, that you might end up loosing traffic to your site because more people will now begin to read your blog through the full feeds, so you would have to figure out how to get your users interacting.

By: jen at semantically driven

jen at semantically driven — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 07:31:55 +0000

I like my full feed. I have unsubscribed from all partial feeds even from the more ‘popular’ blogs because they annoy me so much. I will visit the site if I want to comment and to have a look around.

By: SeanBannister

SeanBannister — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 04:00:36 +0000

It was really interesting to hear your reason for using partial (teaser) feeds, I had never considered that using partial feeds could be an SEO issue. I however do believe that ones fear of big brother Google shouldn’t influence the userability of a website. I know DPS is one of only 2 blogs I subscribe to that use partial RSS feeds as I unsubscribed to the others. So I think it comes down to how good your content is and if people really want it versus the ammount of time wasted in a readers day. I recently unsubribed to a number of blogs because their feeds were just taking up to much time in my day and adding no real value.

By: kristarella

kristarella — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:52:33 +0000

I didn’t recognise that reason for using partial feeds. I always thought it was because people were selfish and wanted their ads to be seen and clicked on. Building the authority of a site is a reasonable one though. I wouldn’t want people to scrape the excellent information on DPS, it would be an injustice to steal the blog information because you would also be depriving readers of the opportunity to join the excellent community there. Looking forward to full feeds though!

By: Ryan McLean

Ryan McLean — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:09:17 +0000

I am slowly building my RSS readership and I am giving them full feeds not partial…we will see how this strategy goes in the coming months

By: The Masked Millionaire

The Masked Millionaire — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 23:59:42 +0000

If you use a partial rss feed then you better have a killer, drop dead right on opening sentence. And I mean every single time.

Because if you don’t then I’m gone.

I think it is risky. With a full rss feed at least the reader can skim a little before they decide to stay or go.

Live From Las Vegas
The Masked Millionaire

By: Kelvin Kao

Kelvin Kao — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:13:29 +0000

I like full feeds. In the case of partial feeds, if I might be interested in a post, I’d have to click on it, go to the site, and decide again if I want to read it. With full feeds, I can make the decision of to read it or not in my feed reader.

In terms of people scraping the feeds, I say that it’s good if you can put some links to other posts of yours in the post. That way you establish that you are the original source to the search engine.

By: Tony Lawrence

Tony Lawrence — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:00:39 +0000

Once again I need to state what should be obvious: you should provide BOTH.

Bloggers seem certain that readers prefer full feeds, but I offer both and know that there are many, many people who want partial.

I’ve been tracking folk’s preferences at http://aplawrence.com/Web/fullorpartial.html for six months now. In that period I’ve gained 300 subscribers, and 80 of them went out of their way to specifically choose the “excerpt” feed.

I think that’s very telling, because if you just hit “Subscribe” you’ll get the Full feed – it takes effort to go for the partial, yet almost a third of them did so.

Don’t fall for the malarkey that people don’t want partial feeds – they obviously do. Give them both, and don’t tick off anyone.

By: Rob O.

Rob O. — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:37:06 +0000

Definitely full feeds. Partial feeds are aggravating to me, so I can reasonably assume that they would be to my readers. Last thing I want to do is cause a subscriber to bail for something as trivial as this…

By: Cuckoo

Cuckoo — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:15:34 +0000

I have given full feeds for all my blogs for two main reasons.

1. Giving full feeds is like facilitating your readers. They can read all the posts without really going to the site (which saves their time & effort) and after reading the post if they want to comment, they come anyway. So, the comments would be genuine, to the point, related to post etc and of course lesser in no.

Since I am in the habit of replying to all the comments, now I have lesser no. of comments to reply which in turn saves my time & effort.

Only disadvantage is that the hit counter not increasing that fast.

By: Brad V.

Brad V. — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:39:28 +0000

I used to prefer only partial feeds, so I could get a “taste” of the post and, if interested, click and read the full post. However, now I prefer full feeds because I realized that even if the beginning of a blog post doesn’t hold my attention, there might be something further down that I want to read.

By: Daniel Bates

Daniel Bates — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:08:03 +0000

I have about 75 subscribers to my site (small town newsletter/ real estate info) and over 50 of those are email subscribers. I chose full feed to simplify their lives, but I have a very low click through rate (because they can read it all on their email) which hurts my traffic (around 100/day). I don’t want to anger my email subscribers but I would like to see who is interested enough in the articles to click for the whole feed and see if it raises my traffic. Not that I do things to please Google, but which do think is better for SEO – more subscribers or more traffic?

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:48:34 +0000

I believe it would be wiser to display full content in your RSS feed. There may be a section of your post that capture the attention of a potential reader. Then again, a partial feed may act as a teaser.

By: Neil Kelty

Neil Kelty — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:36:32 +0000

Unless I really like a blog, I won’t read it unless the RSS feed is a full post. Your (a general you – not ProBlogger) content just isn’t that important to me to make a special case of opening my browser for everything I want to read.

By: boostranks

boostranks — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:31:13 +0000

If you find a scraper, and they have adsense, report them to google for copyright infringement (click the ads by google link, then down the bottom of the page, click the send google your thoughts link)