Rss Feeds?

  • How do I know which sites, my rss feeds is going through? A while ago, I found my rss feeds at another site, which I had to claim as my own. I forgot the link to that site.
    How do I know which sites my rss feed is being showed at, even though it doesn’t show up in the search engine?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • You dont. Unless you watch your server logs, and your persistent.

    And eventually, if someone is kiping your feeds, they will show up in Google – thats the entire intent of them taking them.

    Look for hits from known feed aggregators, the user agents for those are fairly well-known, and be on the lookout for hosts grabbing your feed urls. Most feed aggregators will use the IP and/or domain of the box, not the site when grabbing feeds.

    For instance, a hit to your feed url from something like 123.456.789.dreamhost.com is someone stealing your feed thats, you guessed it, hosted on DH.

    Ive actually had that happen.

    “That’s the entire intent of them taking them”

    That depends who you’re talkin’ about — or maybe I have a different view of feeds than whooami, not sure. I think the majority of legitimate people syndicate the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds that we offer on our blogs, because they like our content, and because we offer the Feed with Free Content for exactly that purpose. (If you don’t want this then disable RSS.) Let’s say your blog is about Healthy Recipes, then your feed might end up in a blog that aggregates feeds about cooking. No harm no foul. That’s the nature of feeds (I think). It is shocking the first time you see your article on someone else’s site, but if it links back to your site and credits your feed adequately (note that you can include a Copyright in your feed using a plugin), and it’s a cool site that puts you in the mix with others’ content, to me that’s one of the purposes for feeds (the other being individuals’ newsreaders – and it’s impossible to separate the 2).

    “Splogs” (spam blogs) are not a legitimate or desired use of RSS feeds, because they republish your content and use it to attract visitors for advertising purposes — these sites aren’t getting you new readers or traffic or credit or friends. That’s annoying, and something bloggers seek to avoid as an abuse of the feeds. What whooami said, I feel that way about splogs, but not about other syndication.

    I got the sense that indiaberry wanted to know which sites were displaying the feeds in a happy way. For example, in my case, I have a podcast, and before I knew it, my podcast was in Yahoo Podcasts and Odeo.com and other sites, where, like indiaberry said, I had to go to that site and “claim” my feed if I wanted to add tags and otherwise tweak it and monitor it and participate in the syndication service that brings me readers.

    You can send all your feeds through Feedburner (using their plugin) and then you get a LOT more info about who’s reading your feeds where. Or, just keep an eye on your server logs and visit some of the referrers’ sites, for a casual glimpse.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Rss Feeds?’ is closed to new replies.