Welcome to Small Steps to Health where we do not take orders from a cookie!
I know for a fact that I do not have as many subscribers as I should on my blog. Usually after a surge in traffic from a Stumble or a link on the blogroll of a popular website , I get a good amount of people subscribing. But after a week, I usually end up losing a good 80% of these new subscribers. I know the reason I lose subscribers is because I do not publish my full RSS feed.
Then why don’t you publish your full Rss feed?
Even though I do not believe that my blog are even at the same level as some of the more popular health bloggers, I still get a lot of scrappers. Scrappers are basically copycats that steal (“scrap”) your content and re-publish it on their site. Most of these scrappers use automatic scripts to post your entries from your RSS feed to their site. There have times when I find my entries in another site within minutes hitting that publish button. Here I am spending hours researching and writing about a topic and within minutes another site would benefit from my work.
Yet, at the same time, I feel that I am losing readers because I am only publishing excerpts of my entries. Personally I have drop blogs from my feed reader because the blogger do not publish their entire RSS feed. What are you doing to prevent content theft from your feed? Please advise me!
Until next time and thanks for stopping by Small Steps to Health.
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Read the articles linked below: They express my feelings perfectly. I do unsub from blogs that only publish partial feeds. Between the personal blogs and the professional blogs that I follow, I probably am subscribed to over 200 of them. If you make me break out of my reading mode to click to your site, then you’re gone. See ya. I don’t have time.
OTOH, if you publish full feeds and I regularly find useful and interesting stuff on your blog, I’m more likely to go visit your site once in a while or click on an embedded link or go to leave a comment (like I just have).
http://winextra.com/index.php/2008/12/10/dont-you-get-it-yet-partial-feeds-kill-readership/
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/dont-make-me-clink-5-reasons-you-should-publish-full-rss-feeds
@Kara – Understand the sentiment. I am subscribed to about 100 blogs myself. Thank you for taking the time to comment and leaving the links. I am still on the fence with this one. It is not the revenue or advertising argument for me as mentioned in those two links. It is the fact that scrappers might steal my content. I even get annoyed when my entire post is re-posted in another blog with a couple of sentences mentioning my site. If only there is a way to distinguish between a legitimate reader and a scrapper site. Now that would solve my problem nicely.
I wanted to make an offer to this post. Perhaps, rather than punishing legitimate readers, we should start punishing the spammers and scrapers that make truncated feeds so appealing.
Here is my advice, go ahead and use full feeds but parse your feed through FairShare (fairshare.cc) and track how your content is being used. If you see sites misusing your content, file DMCA notices with their hosts or with the search engines if that can’t work.
If there is any way I can help you with that, I’ll definitely do so, but I don’t think that truncated feeds are the answer, especially since the technology to scrape content from HTML already exists and is already being exploited by some spammers.
Just let me know how I can help!
Jonathan Baileys last blog post……Google’s DMCA Problem
@Jonathan Bailey – Thank you for your advice. I will check out fairshare. Bloggers on Blog Catalog have complained about how time consuming it is to file DMCA notices. I need a little more education on the process. I will need to spend some time on your site.
Hi Asithi,
I use OHZ Better Feed on my wordpress site. It strikes a better balance in the full posts or summary conundrum! I run three sites and it’s a constant battle to thwart the scrapers. The Better Feed plugin breaks the post at the “read more” tag. So, your readers get enough information to know if they want to read the story, but scrapers can’t take the whole thing.
This worked for me AND improved click-throughs to my sites. Hope it helps you.
.-= Barbara Holbrook´s last blog ..CSULB recognized for ‘Overall Performance’ in Fundraising =-.
Barbara – Thank you for the advice. I will check it out.
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