What do you people use? Full feeds or partial RSS feeds? I am currently using partial feeds however I am wondering what the rest of you use.
Partial feeds. If you provide a full feed you run the risk of some MFA site using your complete articles to make money from.
Partial. The purpose of the feed is to bring the users back in the site. With a full feed they don't have any reason to come back
I was reading an article the other day saying full feeds can actually lead to more traffic than partials. I'm really not sure how that would work. I'm for partial feeds though. When I used full feeds, I found too many people scraping, and I'm simply not a fan of that.
How beneficial is offering rss feeds on website traffic? I am concidering implementing rss but not sure whether to or not.
I can vouch that full feeds DO offer far more traffic. 90% of most readers don't have the time to click on the site, and will just delete feeds that don't have everything they want. If you want a larger readership, go full.
The largest benefit is that it creates loyal readers. If people don't visit your site every day, they might forget it even exists. By adding a feed, it allows them to add it to their reader and you know they'll be reminded when you have new content.
Which is exactly why you should use full feeds ...I voted full feeds because that's what I use on all my blogs.
Full for me. When I switched to full feeds about a year a go I noticed an initial drop in traffic but found I was getting more organic links which led to improved SERPS (hypothesising there) and more traffic from the search engines. I know when I follow the feeds from other sites there is a much greater change of me quoting and linking to a site that I can read in my feed reader.
How do the full feeds affect you with duplicate content? Obviously, if your blog is indexed first, that's a plus, but what if it's a reasonably new blog, and you're not being crawled as often as some of the sites displaying your feed (such as if you have a feed on a Squidoo lens that gets crawled more than a brand new blog of yours or something)?
Jenn - the best thing to do is setup auto-submission of your sitemap every time you publish. This way you can almost be 100% sure that your site will be listed as the source, rather as duplicate.
Also have links in your feed back to your site, that way if your feed does get scraped it will still be linking to you.
I'm a big believer in unique content, which is why I don't do full feeds, use article marketing with anything from my site, etc., aside from a few old non-exclusive pieces I'd written and re-used. So the idea definitely makes me a little bit uncomfortable. I'll likely stick with partials for now, but if I ever switch, I'll be sure to use your tips. Thanks.