RSS Feeds - Partial or Full Feed?

Problogger was running a poll last week to see if people preferred full or partial RSS feeds. The results are in with 75% of the respondents liking full feeds better than partial feeds.

I personally have to agree with the poll results. I prefer full RSS feeds, especially now that I have switched to a better reader where I can actually read the entire post without visiting the website. That is the biggest reason I prefer full feeds and one of the reasons why I offer a full feed here. I am more interested in having people read my blog posts than I am in having people come and actually visit the website. Of course it would be great if you decided to come and leave a comment or two but that is optional.

I can understand the reasons why many people use partial RSS feeds. They want to encourage people to visit their website for various reasons, but I have not read of any hard evidence that says partial feeds encourage people to actually visit more.

Scrapers are another big pain the a** reason to have partial feeds, although I have found that website scrapers are just as likely to scrap a partial feed as they are a full feed. One of the best defences against scrapers is adding comment into the RSS feed similar to this:

Copyright © LGR Webmaster Blog. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement.

This way the copywrite notice is included in the RSS feed and published on their blog/website. I have used this for approach for close to a year on Video Rambler, and started doing it here for a few months now, ever since my feed was scraped. I have changed the text to be more like the one from Blogging Tips.

If you are new to RSS check out this video “RSS in Plain English”: