Conventional wisdom tells us that if you publish partial feeds, people will click through to your site to read the rest of your story. The truth is that it just doesn’t work out that way. FeedBurner’s VP of Publishing Services, FeedBurner’s Rick Klau, noted last week:
Full Text vs. Partial Text Feeds
Ahh, the arguing over whether to do full text or partial text feeds continues. This time with Feedburner saying they aren’t seeing a click-through difference.
Personally I hate partial text feeds. I’ve subscribed to a few of them, particularly ZDNet’s bloggers, but I notice I read a lot fewer of their items than I read items from, say, TechCrunch or Mashable, who offer full text feeds. And I link to them a LOT less.
Full or Partial Feeds
Since the day I began posting on my blog I’ve always published partial feeds of my content. I’ll be honest in that I don’t remember why I made the decision originally, though I suspect it had something to do with not wanting all my content scraped and republished. Until an hour ago I had always thought the partial feed decision was the best way to go. Then I read a single post and did a little research and I now think I may have been wrong all this time.
Debate: Full Or Partial Feeds?
One topic of debate that has gained attention in the blogging community is the choice between using full or partial RSS feeds.