I’ve seen a trend happening in the last few weeks. It goes something like this:
Great headline! Followed up by a snappy introduction that gets me interested and that goes on to determine a problem I can relate to or discusses an important topic to me. I’m there, I’m reading, I’m loving it and…. (read more).
WHAT?!
Blogs that used to supply me with my daily fix in my feed reader are switching to excerpts left, right and center. They’re dropping like flies, going over to the dark side… and seriously pissing me off.
WHY DO I HAVE TO BOOST YOUR SITE HITS TO GIVE YOU SKEWED AND USELESS STAT RESULTS?
There are two numbers that matter, in my view: Feed subscribers and unique hits. That’s it. That’s all. Repeat visitors aren’t important for obsessive, hungry stat counting. It’s about as close to slapping your blogger wang on the table to compare who’s is bigger and longer. (Or comparing bra size, for you ladies out there.)
If I have to go visit each and every site on my damned blog list to read the daily post, I will have to take time to click, load, and visit about 100 blogs. Those blogs will see – what, that I’m a loyal visitor? Wooo. Or wait, do they think that overall hits plus feed subscribers gives them their true, best stats?
No. No, no, no.
We understand how frustrating it is to get excited and then get the door slammed shut in our face. We hate the tempting lure to alter hit stats. We check who’s new and who is subscribed. That’s it. And we don’t post excerpts. We’ve posted about it, we’ve discussed it, and it’s still no, because excerpts are damned irritating in feeds.
(I hope to god our new site publishes full feeds, or else I’m in trouble.)
Do me a favor. If you’ve switched from full feed to partial feed lately, switch back. Because it won’t be long before I get irritated at having to jump through hoops to get to your content, and I’ll take you off my feed subscriber list.
Well, maybe not, because these are good sites, but it felt good to say it.
Take another hint: Go check out some major players, the big A-listers. Do they cut off their feed? No? Then why are you?
/rant
There are other reasons people do it; for example, some blogs content get scraped regularly through RSS feed. I have a few websites where this happens often. It’s very annoying to have your work stolen almost every day. Blog scrapers profit off your content by having adsense blocks on their websites. I know some blog owners who’s site was considered penalized, and the scrapers website ranked higher. I remember seeing a post about this on webmaster world. This happened to one of my blog buddies.
One way a blogs content is scraped is through RSS feed. Some people provide partial feeds hoping it will prevent content being scraped. Personally I don’t think it makes a difference. In the past I tested it and my content was still scraped. If a person really wants to copy your content, they will.
All my websites are copyrighted they still get scraped.
Even though I do use full, feeds I don’t do everything that the A listers do. There are things that a few of them do or recommend that I just don’t agree with but that’s a rant for another day, lol.
I just wanted to give you another reason why some people might be doing this.
@ Opal – Scraped feeds and plagiarism is going to happen. This is nothing new and has been around in all sorts of forms for ages. We’ve had it happen ourselves.
There are ways to fight it, certainly, but my question would be, shall I batten the hatches and create a fantastic defense at the expense of the people, or shall I stand up for what’s right and move forth to give?
It isn’t the *why* people use excerpts. It’s the question whether they *should*.
Thanks for your thoughts.
For what it is worth, I couldn’t agree with you more, James. If the blog is truly indispensable, I’m willing to follow the truncated feed. But, very few blogs fall into that category. If two blogs essentially offer equal value, I’ll definitely subscribe to the one with a full feed over one that uses truncated feeds.
I’ve run a number of blogs – the main reason I’ve used excerpts on a few of them is to improve the front page presentation. If you’re making two or three posts per day, you want them all to be visible on the front page without the reader having to scroll down…at least in my opinion.
Oh man…talking about people begging for hits and here I’ve been auto-notified to receive comments by email. I didn’t even see that little check box down there auto-checked. D’oh!
(by the way, awesome blog…just found it two days ago!)
@ Andrew – Yup. I have no idea why some very good blogs have shifted gears on this. I’ll only grit my teeth so long, I’ll start to skip over posts, I’ll link there less, I’ll comment less… Why ruin your own blog?
@ Chad – Excerpts on front pages do cut off feeds. Agreed. Any function in a WP theme chops a feed. However, there are ways around it. Take Problogger’s feed – full feed, front page excerpts. Not sure how he does it… plugin?
(and thanks for the kind words!)
“blogger wang.” I love it.
Anyway, good post. With RARE exceptions, I delete people that either (a) go off topic (i.e. organizational blogs that get into talking about the Strokes concert, and (B) people that switch to feedlets.
I would however put one of my own blogs into a feedlet if I felt that it was going to work and be something that benefited me.
Keep positng!
James / Chad:
You can accomplish a full-text feed along with excerpts on your front page with WordPress and the Full Text Feed plugin.
As an example, this is what I use on my front page and RSS feed.
@ Andrew – Ohmigod, Harry will love you. He spent two hours last night trying to figure out the solution for our new site. I think you just made our morning.
@Andrew: See that photo up there? That’s how I felt last night trying to work this out. Thanks a bunch for the plug in!
I certainly agree that if you can only do one or the other, you should do a full feed, and that should be your default.
However, not everyone likes full feeds. I prefer a partial feed, and so do many others.
My site offers both, and I’ve been tracking the results since I started doing both two months ago: http://aplawrence.com/Web/fullorpartial.html
Partial feeds are definitely less popular, but people do still deliberately sign up for partial. Consider also that there’s a built-in bias: if you just click on my orange RSS logo, you get the full feed – you have extra steps to get the partial, yet people some do choose it still.
I’m totally with you James, but to avoid getting peeed off I just hit unsubscribe
Life’s too short for partial feeds.
Joanna
PS I’d prefer notifcation of e-mail comments to be opt in not opt out too…
I use the excerpt so I can see how many people click through and actually read the entry. Without it I have no idea who’s reading what.
However, after hearing the rants and agreements perhaps its not worth it?
@ BJ – If you’re using Feedburner, you can see which posts are getting read and which are being clicked through.
Also, we’ve installed the plugin that Andrew linked to up above on our new blog (upcoming; in construction) and it works like a charm. Best of both worlds.
@BJ
And there are other reasons why you should use FeedBurner.. it really makes no sense not to.
You know, I started doing this (unknowingly at first) because sometimes I tend to have wordy posts (thats right – I like to write)
and I wanted my 1st time visitors to see more of what I had to offer when they found my site
I don’t particularly love that my feeds get cut off in the middle. I hear there is a plugin to change that.. maybe I’ll look into that
Abuto content scraping – I find that some people manage to do it anyway
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