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Is it possible to prevent deleted posts from appearing in blog readers like Google Reader?

My blog designer posted all these random test posts that I deleted but realized were still showing in google reader.

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closed as off topic by Nifle, RedGrittyBrick, Zoredache, Sathya♦ Jul 10 '12 at 12:59

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2 Answers

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Whether a blog post appears in a news reader (like Google Reader) is dependent on whether an entry appears in the corresponding RSS/Atom XML file associated with your blog. Your blog software should automatically generate this file. Deleted posts should not appear in this file, so any news readers that subsequently read your newsfeed will not get your deleted posts.

However, any users that have already subscribed to your blogs newsfeed and read this XML file could still be seeing your deleted blog posts in their news reader. Depending on how long their news reader caches this file or the period of time before the XML file is refetched they might be seeing the 'deleted' blog posts for a while longer.

Unfortunately I don't think there is much you can do about this, apart from ensuring the XML file your blog software has generated in up to date.

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As a heavy Google Reader user I can say it caches items pretty much forever. Once an item is added to the feed, and once Google has read the feed with a particular item in it, then it is pretty in Google pretty much for good. – Zoredache Jul 9 '12 at 22:51
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If you deleted the post, depending on your blogging platform, you may be out of luck. If you can undelete the post, so that you can edit and republish it, it may work.[1]

If you can manually create a post with an identical GUID as the deleted post, it will work.

If you didn't use GUID elements to begin with, you may have luck by creating a post with identical pubdate, title and link elements.

[1] If using Blogger, finding the postID of the deleted post from GReader cached atom feed is trivial, so you can edit it in Blogger post editor.

If it's a new site with few or no subscribers yet, the simplest solutions would be to start using a different feed URL. Either completely delete the old feed URL or redirect it to the new one.

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+1 for the GUID trick. Here's an article with more info on implementing this. And as you suggest at the end, I kind of wonder whether this is a new blog, not in the public domain yet?? – w3d Jul 10 '12 at 14:15

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