Thoughts on Themes, RSS and Splogs

In our never-ending efforts to get more readers, more traffic, better statistics, and whatever else we're trying to achieve, we do things we think will make our blogs more attractive to readers, advertisers, search engines and others. Sometimes, I think we're wasting our time.

Changing Themes

I've noticed that a lot of bloggers have been giving their blogs face lifts. For example, Agent Sully over at Life Learning Today replaced her old theme with another theme and announced it with "Life Learning Today Gets a Makeover This Weekend.". She is just one of many.

Changing themes can make blogs more attractive to readers, but only to the readers that actually visit the blogs. The only reason I would ever change a theme would be because I'm tired of looking at it. Why? Because regular readers will normally subscribe to one of my RSS (really simple syndication) feeds and visit only to leave a comment. Sadly, this is an indisputable fact.

Blog design DOES matter, though, and Lin tells us why with "5 Ways To Make Your Blog Posts SCREAM For Attention". If a blog suffers from too many widgets, slow-loading times, and doesn't take advantage of hotspots and readability, changing themes may be the only solution.

RSS Feeds

I spent a few hours clearing out the feeds from my Google Reader account and then re-subscribed to the feeds for the blogs that are still active. In the process, I found quite a few blogs that didn't have subscription buttons, links, or anything to make it easy for me to subscribe. And some of those blogs didn't have the auto-discovery code in their themes, so subscribing to their feeds was a challenge to say the least. I hate to point fingers, but "Ramblings from the Marginalized" is one such blog. I could have constructed the feed address, but I found the FeedBurner chicklet on his "advertise" page. Most of the blogs that either didn't have a button/link or had it way down at the bottom somewhere were Blogger (blogspot.com) blogs. It seems that people who have self-hosted blogs tend to make them more visible.

I can understand if bloggers want to get actual visitors versus feed subscribers because feed subscribers don't see and click ads. The important thing to remember, however, is that regular readers don't click ads. Regular readers contribute in other ways. Why not make it easy for them and put your subscribe button or link in a prominent place?

Splog (Scraper Blog) Concerns

I could go on and on with this topic, but I'll direct your attention to "Should You Let Scrapers Link to Your Blog?" and add my two cents. I haven't seen too many scrapers linking to my blog since I started using the FeedEntryHeader plugin. I think it's because most sploggers are too lazy to strip the links completely out.

When some not-so-lazy sploggers steal my content, at least enough to show up in Google's index, I report them using Google's Webmaster tools. That's part of the reason my blog's PageRank recently rose to 5. By the way, did anyone notice?

Final Notes

Since I've re-subscribed to a whole lot of blogs (and I really mean a lot), you can expect to see my avatar (the vortex image) to appear in a bunch of sidebar widgets (for those that use them) and my name appear in many more comments. Speaking of comments, a lot of people are wasting their time building links with "dofollow" blogs. That's a topic in itself and I'll leave it at that.

March 25th, 2008 By RT Cunningham | Categories: Blogging | Tags: feeds, Google, PageRank, spam, themes |

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Lin on March 25th, 2008 at 7:40 am (Reply)

I think blog design and heavy use of widgets/awards/banners etc is really important to consider because, not only do they increase page load time, but having way too much crap on sidebars actually takes attention away from the text.

I removed several things from my sidebars recently, and have since added back the amazon widgets, as I discovered too late that people are buying through those widgets.

There are days where the vast majority of traffic to my blog is from Google searches vs social media, so for me it makes sense to leave those widgets there.

I've seen an enormous number of "mom blogs" that have sidebars loaded from top to bottom with various awards and such that I actually lose my concentration while attempting to read the post. Ugh.

Lin's last blog post..Taking Care of Aging Parents as a Family

RT Cunningham on March 25th, 2008 at 7:43 am (Reply)

Your experience is my experience.

Tim on March 25th, 2008 at 9:32 am (Reply)

There seem to be two camps on the whole 'dofollow helps your ranking' thing.
I have to say it must make some difference, since our Redneck Bar and Grill mostly has links from the thousands of comments we both leave. The measley few 'given' backlinks are mostly from 4 or 5 blogs owned by our net friends. And thanks for the links,RT and you 3 or 4 others!
Anyways, how to account for PR 4 based on maybe 20 or 25 links from just a few blogs?
And no, I'm not saying Ernie and I just look for dofollow blogs to comment. We look for conversations we can throw some wiseass remark in to make ourselves feel funny.
Speaking of scrapers, I got a couple incoming links from them. Stupid duplicate content idiots…

Tim's last blog post..Quit Your Job & Work Online From a Redneck Paradise?

RT Cunningham on March 25th, 2008 at 9:56 am (Reply)

Well, Tim, there are two different ways to build links with "dofollow" blogs. The problem is that most people are doing it the wrong way. Therefore, they're wasting their time. Hint: It's all relative.

If I get a ping from a splogger, I check it out completely. 99 times out of 100, there's not enough scraped to make a difference.

Paul M. Banas on March 25th, 2008 at 9:32 am (Reply)

You're exactly right that blog design is mostly wasted on your RSS readers. Although to get readers, you need to have a design that doesn't have visitors heading for the exits on their first visit.

I do think most blog owners get bored with their themes long before their readership does.

Paul M. Banas's last blog post..4 Principles Of Persuasive Social Media Marketing

RT Cunningham on March 25th, 2008 at 9:57 am (Reply)

You're right on both counts.

hari on March 25th, 2008 at 12:13 pm (Reply)

For me, I see RSS only as a tool to help readers know when I've updated my site.

I never publish my articles on an XML feed that can be easily stolen with a simple script. I therefore only post a small summary. This is something I will not change because I value my content too much to see it appear on some lowlife's splog.

People who insist on blog authors publishing the full content on RSS are totally misguided and have no idea of how easy RSS is to scrape off. Publishing summary feeds won't prevent scraping, but even if my current content is stolen, it's only the summary, which I hardly care about.

Talking about the same point, was RSS ever intended to be used to deliver full-fledged HTML content? I think not - reading the wikipedia article, I get the impression that XML doesn't allow embedding HTML within it, but somehow people got away by misusing the CDATA section (CDATA is used in XML to "escape" tags). And since most RSS readers implemented a HTML browser anyway, it became kind of adopted as a "standard", but it by no means is a standard.

They didn't call it "Really Simple Syndication" without a reason.

(yes, I'm aware there are ways to "detect" RSS theft, but that really is besides the point - there is no way to actually prevent anybody from stripping off your RSS /Atom feed and publishing the content on their splog. I'm also aware that there are people who manually steal content directly from websites, but those types of content theft are rare and they cannot automate stealing it with scripts anyway - at least not easily)

hari's last blog post..CGI scripts have always mystified me

RT Cunningham on March 25th, 2008 at 8:39 pm (Reply)

RSS feeds were never intended to replace anything, yet they have. As far at the full/partial feed debate, I think it's a matter of choice. Some people won't subscribe to partial feeds, some people won't subscribe to full feeds. I don't think partial feeds keep the scrapers at bay any more than including the copyright notice at the beginning of the feed, but that's just my opinion.
2. hari on March 26th, 2008 at 12:09 am (Reply)
  
  But at least by cutting off that source of scraping, I feel safer in a way.
  
  Since I started putting partial feeds, I've not had any articles stolen outright. (of course, there was a notable exception when a splogger probably copied the content manually, but those types are rare - they hate any kind of work, even copy/paste).
  
  Currently most of the automated splogging scripts use the RSS/XML feeds as the main source of content sponging.
  
  hari's last blog post..CGI scripts have always mystified me

Stephen Cronin on March 25th, 2008 at 6:11 pm (Reply)

I agree with pretty much everything you say here, but that probably won't surprise you…

I didn't notice the PR5. Congratulations - it's well deserved!

I'm interested on your thoughts about DoFollow comments. In your comment to Tim above, you mention there are two ways to use them. It'd be great if you could expand on this (maybe in a separate post). I think I know what you mean, but not sure and many other people would benefit from such a post.

I'm also interested to know you're thoughts on the CommentLuv plugin, which really helps with dofollow comments (giving deep links with keyword rich anchor text).

Stephen Cronin's last blog post..Creating A JavaScript Array Dynamically Via PHP

RT Cunningham on March 25th, 2008 at 8:43 pm (Reply)

Anchors and URLs is what it boils down to. I'll go ahead and do a post on it though, because the more eyes that see it, the better.

The commentluv plugin is great, but not because of the SEO benefits. I'll go ahead and write about that too.

rob on March 25th, 2008 at 6:41 pm (Reply)

I think RSS subscriptions are just as important as visitors to the site. RSS usually leads to a visit, to post comments, or view extended articles.

RT Cunningham on March 26th, 2008 at 1:11 am (Reply)

Yes, but I didn't want to say it. If you manage to get 10,000+ RSS subscribers, you're bound to get at least half of them visiting to comment.

I'm in the neighborhood of 300 and climbing.

DragonLady on March 26th, 2008 at 12:29 am (Reply)

Generally speaking, my blog theme is just for me. Mainly because I feel the need to change it every so often because I get visually bored with it. I'm the same way with the furniture in my house. LOL. I do try to pick/hack themes that I think will not be distracting from the actual content for the readers who don't use an rss feed.

I changed my rss feed to just allow the Feedburner feed, and my scrapers/sploggers seem to have dropped off, at least for the time being. They are why I won't publish a full feed. However, I am going to try out the plugin you mentioned in combination with the Copyfeed one I am currently using and see if I can't totally eliminate them.

DragonLady's last blog post..OTA Monday 76

RT Cunningham on March 26th, 2008 at 1:12 am (Reply)

In your case, I already knew that.

HMTKSteve on March 26th, 2008 at 4:26 am (Reply)

RT, I'd like to read a complete post on how you are finding the scrapers and contacting Google. My PR is down to a 2 from a high of 5.

HMTKSteve's last blog post..Movie Review: Dan in Real Life

RT Cunningham on March 26th, 2008 at 4:57 am (Reply)

Your wish is my command. I'll do that in the very next post, before Stephen's request. It's more important than link-building techniques.

Brent on March 26th, 2008 at 5:01 am (Reply)

Theme changes can certainly have effects that you don't expect. On one of my sites I made a theme change to experiment with improving the CTR on my Adsense ads. While the theme change was successful in that regard, I learned that a text link I had to a friend's site became near useless, despite being in a nearly identical position. I was sending him 30-40 visitors a day prior to the change, and now it's down to about 5 per day. It's still hard for me to believe the difference when the only thing really different is the color scheme.

Brent's last blog post..Free Sweepstakes and Prizes with IPSOS

RT Cunningham on March 26th, 2008 at 5:15 am (Reply)

You're the third person to relate that information to me (in one way or another). I've never experienced it myself — but I've never made a drastic theme change which included color differences.

Yet another good reason to modify what you have instead of making a change.

Todd Morris on March 28th, 2008 at 12:51 pm (Reply)

Hi RT,

I've been know to change themes on my blog from time to time … usually because I'm bored with the old one. I'd also like to think that I'm gradually getting to a point where I'll have it look like I want it, so that I can keep it.

I'm working kind of backwards here … I see you already wrote follow-up articles on splogs and do-follow comments … looking forward to giving them a read.

Todd Morris's last blog post..Striking the Right Balance Between Family and Business