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When I make a substantial update (not just correcting a typo) to an article in my blog, I want to ensure that readers see the updated article again in their news feed. From what I have read, here are some of the options I see:

  1. Create an entirely new article (largely a duplicate of the original). Apparently a bad idea -- duplicate content would be bad for SEO.
  2. Change the published and/or updated timestamp of the article. It seems that, in most readers, this will not make the article show up as unread.
  3. Change the RSS item GUID or Atom entry id. This is a big NO-NO according to the Atom specs, but I'm not sure about RSS.

So, there doesn't seem to be a good option, unless I'm missing something.

What are the ramifications of changing RSS item GUID or Atom entry id? Are the Feed Police going to show up at my door for changing an article ID?

Dan Lowe
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Steve Johnston
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  • As both answers at this point state: there is no perfect way. Changing the guid will make everyone believe that the content is brand new, hence probably creating duplicate content, and chaging just the element will probably not always trigger a full refresh. – Julien Genestoux Nov 20 '13 at 13:32

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The RSS <guid> or Atom <id> is an element used to uniquely identify its parent item. Feed readers and aggregators use this field to determine if the item has already been downloaded or fetched.

If you change an RSS <guid> or Atom <id>, then readers and aggregators may use this as a signal or flag that the item is to be downloaded again because the GUID or ID held previously no longer matches what it has in its database or lookup.

Changing the GUID or ID is not a way to force an update in place. It's a way to say, "I have something brand new for you to download/fetch".

In RSS, if you add ?fake=parameter to the GUID that can be a substitute way to force a new download. But the old fetched item will still remain because it doesn't share the GUID.

You can't reliably force a download via RSS or Atom using the publish or updated date.

Best you can do is to change the contents of the item and allow readers or aggregators to update as they wish, as not all work the same in what they do when they see a change in content like this for an item it already has.

Community
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random
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updating the "updated" field for that entry should be correct. Do not forget to also update "updated" field for feed itself, any Etags/last-modified HTTP headers (if existing but not auto-generated), and wait/force reader to actually do the refresh.

if you still have the problems with some of the readers you should check with feed reading software authors to see if that is intentional.

As for the second part, changing id won't get Feed Police on your door, but if it happens often enough, such articles which would show as duplicate could annoy your followers to just ignore/drop the feed.

see this and this answers too

Community
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Matija Nalis
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As both answers at this point state: there is no perfect way. Changing the guid will make everyone believe that the content is brand new, hence probably creating duplicate content, and chaging just the element will probably not always trigger a full refresh.

Using PubSubHubbub may help as it is fat pings. Wich means that the subscriber will get the updated data right away and can store it under the same key/unique id that the previous version.

Julien Genestoux
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