RSS Feeds: How To Protect Your’s

The quilt blogging community was rocked this week with the news that an anonymous website was scraping a lot of quilt bloggers’ content and posting it on their website as if it were their’s. The site was covered in Google ads, with their hope to get people clicking through to their website from Google searches and make money off those clicks. Unfortunately for them, people noticed and the quilt blogging community was activated to fight back! Within one day, the website was down, but it shook a lot of bloggers.

Truncated Feeds

I have noticed a huge increase in bloggers changing their RSS feed settings to be truncated. What does this mean? It means that if people follow your blog via any method that uses the RSS feed – Bloglovin, Feedly, email, etc – they will only receive the first 100 words or so, requiring them to click through to your blog to finish reading the rest and to see any pictures.

Note – On a computer, Bloglovin only ever shows snippets of the blog post regardless of RSS feed settings and you must click on it to open up the blog post in a new window to read it on the actual blog website. This is not RSS related. On the phone app, it opens the blog post within the app and shows the blog post according to the blogger’s RSS feed settings – full feed, no images, or truncated.

There are pros and cons for choosing to go with a truncated feed:

Pros:
– It will prevent scraping websites from stealing your content.
– Readers are required to click through to your site, getting more pageviews and it means readers see your website with the sidebar ads and links, toolbars, etc and hopefully they click around more while there.

Cons:
– In this day and age, the truth of the matter is that people are time-poor and want quick and easy access to their technology. Requiring them to take that extra step to read your content will put off a lot of readers.
– You only have your blog post title and the first paragraph or so to capture the reader’s attention to prompt them to click through. You had better make them good every time!

Personal Thoughts

I personally provide a full RSS feed, knowing the risk that people might, and have!, scraped my content. My pageviews do not seem to suffer for it, and in fact continue to grow. For me, blogging is about the community and sharing of words and ideas, and were I to truncate my feed, I would personally feel like I am “hoarding” that to myself and MY website. Please remember this is just my own personal feelings regarding my content.

As a reader, I dislike truncated feeds. I read most of my blogs on the Bloglovin app on my phone because that’s the only way I can find the time to read any of them. And once I know that a blog has truncated their feed, I won’t even click on the blog post title to read that snippet unless that headline is really, really good. Eventually, I tend to unfollow most of the truncated blogs. That’s the sad and time-poor truth!

Other Options

Many other quilt bloggers are now adding an RSS feed footer with a claim of ownership to their content. Blogspot bloggers can do so in Settings >> Other >> Post Feed Footer. WordPress users can do the same using a plugin – I use Yoast WordPress SEO. Common wording options include something along the lines of:

“This post was originally posted on (BLOG NAME). If you are seeing this post anywhere else, it is without my permission.”

Whatever you choose to do, think very seriously about it. Please do not be frightened, become distrustful and make reactionary choices. Rather, let the swift and hard action taken by bloggers around the world be an encouragement to you as proof of just how awesome this community really is!