Have you ever wondered how often your podcast RSS feed gets pinged?
It's a lot more than you think.
I was recently tasked with moving the Money Tree Investing Podcast‘s RSS feed away from their WordPress website feed to the one provided by their libsyn account.
One of the steps was to create a permanent redirect using the Redirection plugin (free).
Not only does the plugin redirect visitors from an old URL to a new one, but it will track how many times it is hit.
The Money Tree Investing Podcast's RSS feed was pinged 15,000 times in 24 hours
The redirect was created the night before Thanksgiving 2017. I figured it was a safe time as many people were already settled in for the holidays.
I was surprised to check-in 24 hours later to see the podcast RSS feed (both with and without ending in “/”) was hit over 15,000 times!
What does this mean?
People and their devices are constantly checking for new content.
They will “ping” your RSS feed to check if a new episode was added.
…and it doesn't stop there. Bots crawling the internet can also ping your RSS feed.
While a ping isn't a heavy task for your website server, it is there. This extra work on a web host would be placed on libsyn's servers if Money Tree had submitted their libsyn RSS feed to iTunes, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio in the first place.
There are many reasons I like using libsyn.com as a media host provider. Alleviating a website's workload from RSS feed pings is just one of them.
Thinking about redirecting your RSS feed?
Are you thinking about redirecting your podcast's RSS feed from a WordPress website to libsyn's? Contact libsyn Support for directions.