Excerpt feeds are off-putting to visitors

by Sapphire (March 26, 2008)

I recently tested using excerpt feeds on this site (and a couple of others) for a few weeks - where you just see part of the article in your feedreader and have to click over here to read the rest - to see if it got more people to come over to the site and see my sponsor’s ad.

Once again, it appeared to have the opposite effect.

I’ve read a lot of claims that excerpt feeds drive visitors to your sites. Every time I’ve tested this, I find people click over and comment less often and traffic overall goes down. My theory on why is this: the excerpts are like video. You can’t skim them. You can’t quote them. With all the other feeds people have to read, an excerpt has to be spectacular to get their attention.

I mean, for a while there, Aaron Wall was using excerpts that he carefully wrote himself (as opposed to letting the feed select the first X characters of the post), and even that put me off reading some of his articles. And he’s one of the few SEO bloggers I find always has something valuable to say, even when I don’t necessarily agree with him.

It may vary from one blog to another or one niche to another, but I have consistently found that having the feed serve up excerpts instead of the full post does not invite visitors to click over. A much better solution is to serve the full article and use plugin like Feed Footer to invite people to click over and comment. I’m now using it (see below), and I also included a no-follow link to my sponsor so she’s getting even more exposure for her advertising buck. You could add social bookmarking links, too - anything you want.

Posted in Blogging
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