Publisher's Guide to RSS

Manage Your Feed

Now that your feed is in place and attracting new subscribers, it's time to make sure your content arrives on time, looks just the way it you like it, and gets the clicks it deserves.

Don't Be Late

Yahoo! checks your feed for updates anywhere from once every half hour to once a day, depending on how often you typically update your content. If you'd like your latest updates to immediately appear in your feed, you need to instruct Yahoo! to look for fresh content.

You can do so manually by visiting the following URL via your browser:

http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[THE URL OF YOUR FEED]

Or you can configure your feed to automatically notify Yahoo! whenever you update. For more information about how this is done, please visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Automatic Check for Updates.

A Hint or Whole Hog?

How much of your content do you want to give your subscribers: The full story? Just the titles? Most blog-hosting services offer an easy way to let you set how much of your content that subscribers see. If you're hoping to drive more traffic back to your site, then you might want to set your feed to distribute only the title with a link to your site. But if you're more interested in simply getting your news out to the masses, then give users everything you've got.

A Sense of Order

Syndicated content typically displays in reverse chronological order (with the most recent entries first), and most blog-hosting services set up your feed to deliver content this way. Site developers who have direct access to their own feeds may choose to exercise editorial control within their feeds by prioritizing certain key stories. My Yahoo! will display whatever configuration you establish in your feed, so you can tweak your display until it's sorted to your liking. For more information about how this is done, visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Reprioritize Content.

Track Your Success

Yahoo! currently tracks and reports the number of active subscribers and the total number of pageviews for those subscribers for each of your feeds. This information can be found in your logfiles, under the user agent "YahooFeedSeeker."

Here is an example of access log information:

  66.218.65.52 - - [23/Mar/2004:08:13:30 -0800]
  "GET /blog/rss2.xml HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-"
  "YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0;
   MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html;
   users 236; views 36994)"

Another way to access your feed logs is by hosting your feed via a service like FeedBurner, which offers built-in traffic tracking and analysis tools.

For more details about tracking your feed traffic via Yahoo!, visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Feed Traffic Data.

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