I think the title of this blog post is very self explanatory. There has always been a debate in the blogger community about whether to show full feeds RSS, or to show partial RSS Feeds. I always had the debate in my head also in the beginning, but I have decided to go with Full feed RSS. Find out why in this post. Also I wanted to ask my users because you are the ones who subscribe to them. Which one do you find better? This question was inspired by the question and answer week on Problogger, and I thought it would be a great time to ask my user the same question and get their views. As well as answer this mystery in my ways.

What is the difference between Full Feed RSS and Partial Feed RSS?

Full Feed RSS is when you show your full posts in your RSS Feeds which means everthing is shown in the rss feeds. Whereas Partial RSS feeds are when you show an excerpt of your posts to notify users that you have a new post, and if they like the excerpt they can come visit your site and read more.

Partial RSS Feeds

Partial RSS Feeds are a great way to keep people to visit your blog rather than just having them read your blog posts through the feeds. Also with Partial RSS Feeds you are eliminating the risk of duplicate content because scammers who are copying content cannot extract the content from your rss feeds. By choosing Partial RSS Feeds, you give your subscribers a reason to visit your blog and that is to read your full post. Most people subscribe to this type of feed for notification purposes.

Disadvantages of Partial RSS Feeds are that they might not work exactly how it sounds. In theory this way is perfect, but in reality it is not. For you to attract your readers to visit your blog, you must have a really attracting excerpt otherwise they will find it boring and not read the whole thing. Mostly the feeds just summarize your posts, so you can set it to be the first 300 words, but the downside is that if you didn’t get the attention of your users in the first 300 words then you are not going to get any visits from those readers. Alot of people like to save the good stuff for the end, but the good stuff is not even useful because the reader is not going to read it. Another disadvantage of Partial RSS Feeds is that most people won’t subscribe to it, if they have to go to the blog anyways to read your blog. Why bother subscribing? So your subscriber count will be lower than what it could’ve been.

Full Feed Rss

Full RSS Feeds are a great way to increase subscribers to your blog. More people would like to read the post by itself rather than seeing all the images of your site, and others just want to read the posts in their email rather than visiting your site over and over and not finding anything new. But this way you will have alot of subscribers and you get the bragging rights.

Disadvantages of full feed rss is that you have a risk of other people scraping your content. Also another big thing is if people stopped visiting your site, and just reading your post through feeds. Then your feeds will get more visits then your homepage, and do you really want that?

Let me explain how you can use this technique effectively. Well what you need to do is encourage your users to comment on the blog. How do you get more comments is by simply asking the users at the end of each post feel free to comment. Why should they comment ? Read more about how to attract comments to your posts. Also you are wondering how will you ever let your users know that you are offering full feed rss. Just add it at the end of each post that you have full feed rss. This gives your users more option to read.

Now that is a basic summary, and you can see that I like Full Feed Rss better than Partial RSS Feeds, but what I need to know from my readers is that What do you guys prefer? Because you are the readers who have to subscribe and read through the feeds in email or what not. How would you like this to be?

Also other bloggers are welcome to share their thoughts in this post.