Shimon Rura recently shared some clarifying thoughts to the Berkman blog email group on how to accurately count your hits in the world of RSS. I found his thoughts very useful and want to pass them on. Shimon is currently developing a new blog system, Frassle, which includes many advanced content management and taxonomy features. The rest of this post contains his own words in response to question from some one who recently installed RSS and noticed their hits go way up.
“Links in the RSS feed don't normally get hit when the feed itself is downloaded. It's possible that someone could design a reader that did this for some reason, perhaps to pre-fetch pages for offline reading, but I'm sure this behavior isn't widespread.
If you're seeing lots of hits since RSS, I'd suggest you analyze the new traffic into two buckets:
1. The RSS feeds themselves. These will get a lot of hits, since someone who might have only visited your site once a day or week might instead be having an aggregator visit you every hour. An inconsiderate aggregator might even be configurable to hit your site every few minutes; you should treat these the same way you treat other abusive automatic page fetches.
If your RSS feeds have substantial content and few links into the rest of your site, readers may be able to get all their news via RSS without browsing into the rest of your site.
2. Links from RSS. This is harder to isolate from log files, but refers to links people click from the stuff they see in their RSS aggregator. These are regular web pages, but because people are reading updates in the aggregator they are more likely to go to these pages. You can count this as bona fide additional reader interest.
Therefore, to analyze your traffic gains I suggest you count hits to your RSS feed(s) separately from the rest of your site.”
Thanks Shimon.
You're welcome Bill! I'm glad you found my explanation useful and I hope others will to.
P.S. There's an H in my name. :)
Posted by: Shimon Rura | October 29, 2004 at 08:59 AM