When you are involved in RSS everyday you get to see fantastic opportunities RSS can bring to web and how it can contribute to bettering browsers experience and webmasters bottom line. Unfortunately there is a dark side of RSS use.

It continues to amaze me how some webmasters always see ways to abuse new communication mediums. It is well know that email has become synonymous with spam. Email was a great communication tool when it arrived, but individuals soon started to abuse email by sending unsolicited messages to everyone with an email address. Now same seems to be happening with RSS.

More and more webmasters are starting to use RSS to improve and maintain a good relationship with their readers. They are using RSS correct way by keeping their readers informed and using RSS to syndicate content around web. I talk more about this at http://www.newsniche.com/ where I help to inform and educate webmasters about RSS.

Unlike email you can't spam readers using RSS as it is a pull technology which means as a webmaster you do not have contact details of your readers. Unfortunately as RSS is such a good tool for syndicating content it looks like some webmasters have taken that to mean all RSS content is public domain. This has lead to RSS feed being copied verbatim and reused in new feeds or republished on websites.

I know what your thinking, what exactly is my problem, that's what RSS is for. Well consider this. How would you feel if you found contents of your feed copied word for word in another feed and also replicated on someone else's website. No problem you might be thinking, think of all traffic it will bring to your site. No, I'm afraid all links back to your site have been removed, in fact all reference to you has been removed. It's as if you didn't even create content.

Several weeks ago I spent a good few hours finding blog directories with decent traffic to submit my blog to. Now it is time to see what sort of results there has been in terms of traffic from these directories.

I have submitted http://www.blogtonomy.com/ and http://newsniche.com/ to a handful of blog dig directories. These are directories that list blogs themselves rather than their RSS feeds. The aim of exercise is to see if this generates any traffic back to these sites.

The source of referrals that have been used to track results are from log analysers looking at my raw logs and a third party page tracking service. This should give a more balanced view of actual traffic. The reason for this is that different software seems to report different results, these difference in these result can sometimes be quite startling.

Now for results. So far only two directories have contributed any traffic back to my site. In both cases I think traffic was generated from new listings areas of directories. The numbers of referrals are few, I do not expect much more traffic to be generated in future as my sites are no longer listed in new listings section.