Home > Blogging > To Bloggers: If You Publish Your Feed Do NOT Use “Summary Only” – Here is Why

To Bloggers: If You Publish Your Feed Do NOT Use “Summary Only” – Here is Why

January 21st, 2011
Marketing Advertising Blog — VuManhThang.Com

I expect everyone to say the same thing to me about my blog too…the reason I use a feed reader is that so I can quickly scan/read your blog posts. I do not want to have to click through to your blog to read more than a summary. I won’t, and I don’t, and frankly, people who publish their feeds as summary usually get dropped from my feed reader. Let’s be honest here: there are only a very few bloggers out there who can get away with summary only feeds. I’m not one of them, and you aren’t either. So publish your whole post, not simply a summary of it, please.

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Categories: Blogging
  1. Troy
    January 21st, 2011 at 09:52 | #1
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    But if you don’t click to their actual blog, then how will you ever see the ads that companies are paying them to put there?

    For me, blogs like that get dropped for a different reason: they become one big string of paid commercials, and I no longer trust them to provide their actual opinion. I can get that by watching late-night TV.

  2. Dave Lambert
    January 21st, 2011 at 10:00 | #2
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    Thanks for the suggestion. I just double-checked our blog to make sure it wasn’t publishing the feed as a summary.

  3. Sandy K
    January 21st, 2011 at 12:57 | #3
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    TOTALLY agree! The blogs that do that never last more than a day on my reader list. I don’t have time to click through to all the blogs I subscribe to…just let me read it in google reader and be done.

  4. Jen
    January 21st, 2011 at 13:21 | #4
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    Amen to that.

    You were on summary for a while. I hated that.

  5. Dan at Necessary Roughness
    January 21st, 2011 at 14:43 | #5
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    Way back in the day, I had my feed set for full, and I caught someone scraping my content. Fortunately, they stopped when I asked nicely. So I went to summary for a while.

    I went back to full when I discovered it made it easier for the search engines to direct people to your blog. Search engines also got smarter about original source content and slammed the door on scrapers.

    So yes, full content, just because more people can find what they are looking for on your blog.

  6. Rev. Roger D. Sterle
    January 21st, 2011 at 19:42 | #6
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    I am not sure what a “feed reader” is. Is that what RSS feed means so that when you ask for that you don’t get the whole blog but only a portion. Enlighten me please

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