Friend and colleague Stephanie Booth writes about the blogazine, which I’ve covered here already, and the frustration she feels when faced with blogs that only post excerpts to their front page (and, I’d add, RSS feeds). I want to pick up on the point about partial posts and want to say in no uncertain terms:

Partial posts or excerpts are bad practice.

They are bad practice for media outlets, but they are especially bad practice for business blogs. As Steph says, partial posts put a barrier between your content and your readers and although it’s a low barrier, just a click high, it’s still a barrier. Trying to artificially inflate page views by forcing people to click through from the front page, or from RSS, is nothing more than an attempt to fake greater popularity. It doesn’t mean that you actually have more readers, just that they have to click twice. Like Steph, I seriously doubt that it makes any difference to SEO, and if you’re willing to sacrifice user experience for a potentially tiny bump in your search engine ranking, what does that say about how you treat your customers?