Feeds can hurt your blog traffic
Rachel over at Christians in Good Company has a post titled Google Reader: Friend or Foe? and it made me consider how feeds may be adversely affecting blog traffic. I am not talking about your blog’s feed hurting your traffic even though that could be true since you don’t get hits on those readers if you are providing full post content in your feed, but rather I am talking about the feeds we read via tools like my Google Readers on my iGoogle page. Much like Rachel, I often skip the process of visiting and commenting on posts I view in my reader even though I traditionally would have left a comment on many of the posts I read. In my opinion that can and has led to the decline in traffic on my blog(s) since I am not leaving those little link crumbs pointing back to my blogs since I am not commenting nearly as much as I used to.
I really have noticed my page hits have declined since I’ve not really been commenting much anymore. There’s probably much more about Google Reader that I probably don’t know about.
September 1st, 2008 | #