Feeds: Full or Truncated?
by taxi - October 28, 2008 10:40pm
I had changed my Blogger.com blog feed setting to “truncated” about a month or so ago, based at the outset on the fact that aggregators wouldn’t reproduce pictures or videos I had posted. In enough cases, the “text only” feed for a post with a picture or a video I talked around just didn’t make much sense without the picture or the video there in front of you. In the month or so that I’ve had feeds truncated, I only got two complaints from two readers.
But I would rather not disappoint them, so I turned the feeds setting back to full a little while ago.
Does it really make any difference? I read some links included in the most recent complaint I got, wherein the truncation of feeds was generally argued against, and cited as a short term gain in traffic with a trade-off of long term reduction in getting linked …links which, they all argue, would tend to generate higher traffic in the long run.
What I noticed right away after turning the feeds to truncated was a slight decrease in weekly hits, so maybe those rationalizations about short term gain versus long term loss haven’t got anything figured out at all.
The fact is, I’ve been keeping a close record of hits on a weekly and monthly basis in Excel, and I can tell you without any reservation that there is absolutely NOTHING I’ve ever seen that has a direct effect on traffic. The level of traffic is independent of how many times I post in any given period. It’s independent of the trends in subject matter. It’s independent of comment frequency. And it’s independent of anything else I could ever hope to measure or have any slightest control over.
Anyway, I’ve turned the feeds setting back to “full” despite knowing that this will just needlessly bulk up my favorite aggregator over on Worcester Activist… needless, that is to say, unless that’s the way most people like it.