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Copyright © 2007 - The Crazy Mind
A Webmaster Blog
Following my previous post on
Where to ping your XML and RSS Feeds for more traffic
Now you will have doubts on
How can you find out which other websites are consuming your RSS feeds?
Is there a special way of searching on Google for this, or should you just enter the URL of your feed in the search box?
There are several ways to do this. A lot of people use 3rd party services like FeedBurner to track these sorts of details.
FeedBurner will capture all your feed traffic because they’re serving up your feeds for you. All the traffic from the feed goes through their systems and their tracking. It’s quite accurate.
My suggestion when using a service like this is to make your real RSS feed a 302 redirect so that if you ever decide to part company with the service your real RSS URI won’t be pointing to the old service, and you won’t inconvenience your subscribers.
You can use FeedBurner for this. If you proxy your feed through FeedBurner, they will give you a number of stats including the circulation of your feed and, optionally, rewrite the link elements to give you detailed click-through statistics.
The one tricky thing with calculating the number of subscribers is categorizing the different kinds of user-agents that hit your feed into bots, browsers, aggregators (”server-based reader”), and clients. Bots and browsers don’t generally “count” as subscribers, while a single hit from an aggregator like Bloglines or My Yahoo may represent a number of readers.
And looking at these user agents in raw logs reveals how many subscribers there are with these services.
YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; …;users xx; views yyyy)
LiveJournal.com (…; …; xx readers)
Bloglines/2.0 (…; xx subscribers)
Anyway, if you love promoting your blog, feel free to give it a shot.