How can we track the RSS Feeds after submitting them to aggregators

I developed RSS Feeds to my site and submitted them to some of the aggregators 2 days back using the rss submit tool. Now I want to track the aggregators whether my site has been approved or not.

My Question is how can i track the aggregators.

thanks

The aggregators use spiders just like the search engines, so you can check your logs for which spiders are hitting your feeds, most of them will say which site they are from in their User Agent string. e.g. Technorati's spider is called 'Technorati', Feedster's is called 'Feedster.com' and so on.

Are you also using Pingomatic to announce when your feeds have changed? That can help you out as well as it polls places like Feedster so they know to spider you again.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Can you explain how to check the logs of the spider, who are hitting my RSS Feeds? and any suggestions regarding the Pingomatic

How you do this depends on your webstats package, in which case you need to look at the 'User Agent' area and see if you're being visited by User Agents like 'Feedster'.

If your stats package (e.g. Webaliser) only shows you the most common User Agents, then it might be easier to check your logs by hand. So...

Download your log file (probably something like access.log, or ex050831.log depending on the format - if you don't know where your log is ask the host of your website and they'll be able to provide it.) Then open it in a basic text editor like Notepad and run a search for the filename of your feed, e.g. myfeed.rss

When you find myfeed.rss just to the right of it will be the User Agent of what read the file. If the word 'Feedster' is in there, you know it was the site Feedster reading the feed rather than a visitor's own feed reader.

Keep repeating the search until it can't find myfeed.rss any more, the log contains info about every file that's ever accessed on your site, so it's quite a long document. I've noticed the msnbot and Zyborg (Looksmart's spider) both read RSS files linked to by the 'link rel="alternative"' line I wrote about before, so you're likely to see them turn up as User Agents reading the file.

The User Agent for Zyborg will look something like this:
"Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 (wn-14.zyborg@looksmart.net; http://www.WISEnutbot.com)"
And for msnbot:
"msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

I would guess some stats packages are starting to give some focussed information on feeds as they've got so popular, especially in blogging circles, but I don't know what any of them are.



Go to http://pingomatic.com

Fill in the top of the form with your blog/site details, then check the services you want to tell your site has updated. I suggest choosing all of the options above 'specialized services' apart from Weblogalot and Technorati, which I believe you have to register with. Don't bother with the specialized services unless you have something that matches with them (e.g. audio content like a podcast.)

If your site is not a blog then leave out blo.gs and the ones with 'blog' at the start of their name.

When you click 'submit ping' it will notify each of the sites about your update. You can then bookmark that page and whenever you update the site/feed, click on that bookmark and it will send out the notification again (saves you having to fill in the form.)