Referring URL information in clicks within feed readers?

Question

When a user clicks ona link in a blog feed from within a feed reader (or email program like Yahoo! Mail), does that send referring URL information that identifies the feed in which the link appeared? As it would if they clicked on the web page version of that content?

Answer 1

The referer is sent by the client in the http header portion of the request. For this reason referer is notoriously unreliable (notice the rise in "referer spamming".)

For an aggregator that is providing a web interface, typical web clients will send the referer in the same way as they would for any other link.

A standalone client could make the referer whatever they chose to, but I suspect that they probably wouldn't have a referer set.

I know that for a site I developed, we basically have no visibility into how many people might be reading our site using rss readers, although we do know that our rss feed url gets the largest number of hits. Most of those hits are from syndicators (many are probably ill behaved and reading the feed too often) but I assume that at least a portion are coming from rss readers.

A better indication that readers are hitting the url would be looking at the agent information for requests to the rss feed itself, as most readers set that agent to be something that identifies (and thus advertises) the reader.