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Google Reader: Tips for Publishers

Online users increasingly consume their favorite content through feed reading applications. If you're a publisher, these techniques and recommendations can help ensure that your feeds provide the best possible experience to your users.

Table of Contents

Feed "best practices"

Having engaging, useful content is the surest way to drive subscriptions to your feed and page views to the site itself. However, a high-quality feed will influence how much time users will be willing to spend assessing your content. So we suggest paying attention to the following:
  • Write engaging and descriptive headlines. Many feed readers only display the titles of articles, so the title ultimately determines whether a user will read your content. "10 tasty recipes for Thanksgiving" has more usefulness and appeal than "Yummy yummy".
  • Include pictures. Feed readers ignore most formatting from the original site, so images are an important way to make your content stand out.
  • Don't overload your users. Most users won't want more than a few high volume feeds such as Digg or the New York Times. For most publishers, aiming for 1-10 articles a day will make your feed more manageable. If your site publishes more content than this, consider providing a feed of top entries, or multiple subfeeds pertaining to specific topics.
  • There's a steady debate on the issue of full-content feeds vs. partial-content feeds. While there are good reasons to choose either option, the user experience is generally better with full-content feeds, as the user no longer needs to click through to read an article. Be aware that some users choose not to subscribe to partial-content feeds because of the extra effort involved in reading them.

Implementing feeds

It's also important to pay attention to your feeds' technical implementation.
  • Google Reader supports all versions of RSS and Atom. We recommend using either Atom 1.0 or RSS 2.0, preferably not both. Offering multiple formats can confuse users and has little benefit since most feed readers support all major formats.
  • If a feed is incorrectly formatted or does not obey standards, it can produce duplicate entries and render poorly. To avoid this, validate your feeds using the feed validator. It's also a good idea to test your feed in major feed readers to make sure it behaves appropriately.
  • Pay attention to character encodings and escaping. Follow the specs and test in a feed reader to ensure that tricky characters like & and < display correctly.
  • We recommend the use of the Atom and RSS 2.0 elements to unambiguously identify items. An item that is updated should keep its original ID, and a new item should never reuse an older item's ID. Changing IDs unnecessarily may result in duplicate items, and reusing IDs may cause some items to be hidden. "Tag URIs" make good IDs, since they don't change even when you need to reorganize your links.
  • For more information about our crawler, please consult the FeedFetcher FAQ.

Using feed "auto-discovery"

Most modern browsers provide built-in functionality that makes it easy to subscribe to feeds. For this to work, your site needs to notify the browser of your feeds' locations through appropriate tags. Auto-discovery tags are also used in search engines like Google Reader's "Add Subscription" search. Find out more about feed auto-discovery tags.

Using "Add to Google" buttons

Feed subscription buttons are a great way to boost readership of your content, since they make subscribing easy. The "Add to Google" button allows our users to subscribe to any of your feeds with just a couple clicks. Find out how to insert an "Add to Google" button on your site for feeds you offer.

Add to Google button

Using "clips" for shared items

Many publishers use Google Reader to help them stay abreast of industry news and make sure their articles are timely and relevant. A great way to add interesting content to your site is to share items from Google Reader with your audience. It only takes one click to share an item, and we've made it easy to display the latest headlines on your site. Find out how to put a clip on your site (Google Reader users only).

Shared Items

Frequently-asked questions

Does Google Reader report subscriber counts?

Yes, Google Reader reports subscriber counts when we crawl feeds (within the "User-Agent:" header in HTTP). Currently, these counts include users of both Reader and iGoogle; over time they'll also include subscriptions from other Google properties.

The "User-Agent:" header includes the name of our crawler ("FeedFetcher-Google") along with its associated URL, the subscriber count and a unique 64-bit feed identifier ("feed-id"). You might see multiple requests for the same feed with distinct "feed-id" values. This happens if the same feed is referenced through multiple URLs (for example, because of redirects). In that case, you'll need to sum up the subscribers to a feed that have distinct "feed-id" values to determine the total number of Google subscribers to that feed.

Here's an example of the contents of the "User-Agent:" header:

User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=1794595805790851116)

If you don't have access to your logs, analytics solutions such as FeedBurner make it easy to track your subscription counts across a variety of feed readers

Won't supporting feeds decrease my page views?

Rich, full-content feeds make users happy because it allows them to view your content with minimal effort. While moving to full-content feeds may result in a short-term decline in visits to your website itself, the long-term gains of increased readership and mind-share are generally worth it. There are also an increasing number of ways to monetize your feed content directly. Ultimately, it's important to bear in mind that a regular subscriber is often more valuable than an occasional visitor.

I have another question or comment. Where can I send feedback?

If you didn't see your question here and you're still experiencing problems, or if you have any comments or feedback about Google Reader, please feel free to post a message on our discussion board.