RSS Feeds and Page Hits
September 20, 2009
Does anyone know the answer to this question? If you read a post via an RSS feed in Google Reader, for example, does it register as a “hit” on the blog? I don’t get very many hits, but I wonder if more people are following the blog through my RSS feed; maybe their readership is invisible to me because of the way the system works?
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I don’t think it does register – well, that’s the excuse I use for lack of hits anyway. I have recently registered with feedburner that does look at the number of people subscribing to blog feeds without visiting.
I think that’s what ‘syndicated views’ are? If you look at a particular post’s view history there’s two lines, one for one-site views and one for syndicated. But I might be wrong.
Alderson, I never saw that before. Thanks for pointing that out.
Richard: what does feedburner do? Other than allow you to track RSS feed subscriptions?
I only set it up for myself a couple of days ago but tracking subscriptions (including methods (reader / netvibes / yahoo etc and reader locations) seems to be pretty much it.
Taken together with visitor stats it seems to give a pretty good overview of who’s reading your stuff.
Another nice thing about feedburner is it lets people subscribe to a blog by email (like an email listserv) as well as by RSS feed. This is nice for people who don’t use an feed reader, but do use email. And it also gives you lots of stats.
I don’t know about reading through google reader registering as a “hit,” but I know you can go into google reader and search the blog through “Add a subscription” and your blog has 60 subscribers.
If I sign up for feedburner will it mess with the existing RSS feed? I.e., will people be unsubscribed or will the existing feed stop?
I think if you pipe your feed through Feedburner, nothing will happen to the existing subscribers, but unless they re-subscribe to the new feed, Feedburner won’t collect any traffic stats on them.
Yeah, I think Nathan is right.