For a long time, SEOmoz’s RSS feed has been full text – the entire content of every post (minus images, polls & embedded video) has gone out to readers that subscribe through a feed format. According to Feedburner, a majority of our blog readership accesses the blog in this manner – we average a bit over 4,000 feed subscribers, get about 5-600 clickthroughs from feed listings and have only 1-2,000 readers accessing the blog & tracker page on any given day (excluding direct surfing through SEs or links to blog posts).
Danny Sullivan recently wrote about his feelings on full text vs. partial RSS feeds:
Geez — you’re not generous or benevolent because you don’t provide a full feed? That’s a bit much, don’t you think? You’ve inconvenienced someone with a click, and that makes you stingy or mean?
My reasons for not having published full feeds to date are simple. People steal your content…
…My best advice for those sticking with summary feeds is simple: watch your titles and descriptions. Posts will live and die by them. I feel readers will click through if you tell them what to expect. But too many blogs have non-descriptive titles or summaries that don’t cover what the post is about.
Want to see some good examples? Check out SEO Book, then look the summaries of items as shown in the feed. Usually, Aaron spends a good deal of care making sure he puts out a description especially written for those who take his feeds. He writes a post, then he writes a separate description for it. I appreciate that as a reader, and I often click through.
I’m in a similar boat. SEOmoz’s feeds get posted on lots of splogs and I certainly don’t have the time to send legal notices out to everyone. We also don’t get nearly the level of comment participation and community through feed readers, who click through infrequently and comment even less. Since interaction and community are such a huge part of what SEOmoz is about, and because our new model may have some monetizable elements (and I don’t want to place ads in the feed), we may be switching over to a partial text, summary-style feed.
Trust me when I say that I want to be as generous as possible with SEOmoz’s content and make it accessible to people, but I also know how important the elements of interaction, commenting, and seeing the full content in its proper format can be. It’s tough to weigh the positives and negatives, but I think it is worth a vote:
Thanks for your input – it goes a long way into helping us make these decisions 🙂
