Syndication hits are counted the same way regular page hits are counted: each time the page it generated it increments the counter. In syndication it means something different though because an aggregator will pull the page each time someone who has subscribed asks their aggregator to see if you have any new posts.

So someone could refresh their aggregator 4 times a day, thus generating the page 4 times, but they don't read anything because the aggregator tells them there is nothing new. It has to pull the page to compare it to what it knows you've read in order to tell them that, and in the process your syndication count goes up.

Thanks EdB, so should I interpret that as meaning taht the syndication hits are of next to no use?

One thing that has nagged me for a little while about RSS is what it does to search engine popularity. If the internet community is equally often reading one page by RSS and another directly, will the search engines have a clue about that? Or will the page read frequently by RSS get downgraded in popularity for having fewer direct hits?

RTomes wrote:

Thanks EdB, so should I interpret that as meaning taht the syndication hits are of next to no use?

One thing that has nagged me for a little while about RSS is what it does to search engine popularity. If the internet community is equally often reading one page by RSS and another directly, will the search engines have a clue about that? Or will the page read frequently by RSS get downgraded in popularity for having fewer direct hits?

Im no expert with this, but here's how I understand it.

The hits will help you determine if there are Feed hits for your blog. Not to be interpreted as "read hits" or "unique hits" and the like but more on determining the percentage of Feed requests.

The more feed requests that are logged, the larger the possibility that you have lots of readers.

It is true that refreshing a feed put the hit count up. But do consider that a single person will only refresh when it is his/her reading time and that's like 2 to 3 times a day. I don't think anyone will get 10 people who refreshes your feed every hour, unless you are running a FIFO contest or something :p

Then regarding the search engines, the top 3 SEs created a separate index for feeds, one reason is that before feeds affect SE positioning, or ranking in the results. So with it now separate, the main search area will not produce feed links/results. With that move, feeds do not affect your SE ranking BUT feeds do help in getting your freshest post to the main SE.

With my recent tests, because my feeds are indexed by Google, when I post something new, it will take only 20 minutes the most for my new post to appear on the main search of Google. Unlike before, it may take 24 to 48 hours before a new post appears on the SEs, unless your site is really popular.

Hope that helps... and correct me if I'm wrong :p

Is there something that you had to do for google to index your feed?