How To Add My Wordpress Blog To Bloglovin

Did you know that it may be possible for someone to read your entire blog post on Bloglovin', or via other feed readers, without ever visiting your website?

When I first discovered Bloglovin' I thought it was a fantastic platform. It allowed me to easily follow all of my favourite blogs in one place, and it gave my blog exposure with almost zero work for me to do.

All I had to do was connect my blog to my Bloglovin' account, and then going forward, every time I published a new post, it would be shared for my followers to see.

But over the years, I fell out of love with Bloglovin'. As the company evolved, they began making changes that put profit first, and their users seemed to become an afterthought.

At one point, Bloglovin' had a canonical URL on their site, which told search engines that their copy of your blog post was the original, meaning that your website would be penalised for duplicate content. Obviously, this caused a lot of controversy in the blogging world.

The canonical URL issue has now been resolved (thank goodness!) but it is still possible to read your entire blog post on Bloglovin without ever leaving their website. And this can be problematic.

In this post I'm going to share with you 3 ways to stop Bloglovin', and other feed readers, from displaying your entire blog post on their website.

What is the problem with Bloglovin' showing your entire blog post on their website?

The problem is people can read your entire blog post without ever visiting your website. That means they don't have to click through to your website to read the post, and this results in fewer referrals.

With blogging, our aim is to get people to on to our websites and keep them there for as long as possible. We want people to read a blog post, then read another one and so on. But they might not be able to do this if they aren't on your website in the first place.

What can be done to stop this?

There are a number of ways that you can stop Bloglovin' from displaying the whole blog post:

1 | Truncate your blog posts

Truncating your posts means that Bloglovin' and other feed readers will only be able to show a snippet of your blog post, or the post excerpt if you utilise these.

I personally think this is the best option as it means the readers can still follow you via feed readers, but they will have to click through to your website to read the entire post. Hell yes to referrals!

To truncate your blog posts in WordPress, login to your WordPress dashboard, and head to Settings then Reading.

Accessing the Reading settings in WordPress | HollyPryce.com

Here you will find a setting "For each article in a feed, show", for which there are two options: Full Text and Summary. To truncate your posts, choose Summary.

Settings to show summary of blog post in feed | HollyPryce.com

Then click Save Changes at the bottom of the page and you're all set. Now, each time you publish a blog post, Bloglovin' (and other feed readers) will only display a summary of your post instead of your entire post.

2 | Request that Bloglovin' remove your blog from their site

It is possible to remove your blog from Bloglovin' but it's not exactly straightforward. Obviously, Bloglovin' don't want you to leave, so there's no handy "Remove blog" button.

Instead, you have to submit a request to Bloglovin' using this form, asking them to remove your blog.

Bloglovin' contact form | HollyPryce.com

Bloglovin' say you should do this if you blog is "no longer publicly available", but they should remove your blog from their site if you request regardless of whether your blog is publicly available or not.

Personally, even though I hate Bloglovin', I wouldn't choose this option because I still want to provide as many ways as possible for my readers to follow along with my blog. And if they want to follow along via Bloglovin' then that's their choice.

Also, Bloglovin' will help with generating referrals and getting your ideal audience to your blog with minimum effort. Why wouldn't you want to make the most of that?!

3 | Disable your RSS feed

Another option is to disable the RSS feed for your blog. This is quite a dramatic step to take as it nobody will be able to follow your blog using a feed reader, but if you wish to go ahead with this technique, the easiest way to disable your feed is with a plugin.

I recommend a plugin called Disable Feeds which has over 20,000 active installations.

To install this plugin, sign in to your WordPress account and go to Plugins then Add New. Search for "Disable Feeds" and you should find a plugin that looks like this:

Disable Feeds plugin WordPress | HollyPryce.com

Click Install and then Activate, and you're done! Your feeds are disabled and you're posts will no longer appear on Bloglovin' or other feed readers.

Finally, support other bloggers!

If you use Bloglovin' to follow your favourite blogs, and you want to read a post someone has written, click through to their site rather than reading the whole article on Bloglovin'.

And if you want to be really helpful, inform that blogger that you can read their entire post without ever visiting their site. They might not know about this issue, and they may really appreciate you informing them.

Do you use Bloglovin' or any other feed readers? Were you aware of this issue? Will you take action to ensure that the only place someone can read your entire blog post is on your blog?

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