Can RSS feeds be distinguished from normal web traffic?


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Can RSS feeds be distinguished from normal web traffic?

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Can RSS feeds be distinguished from normal web traffic?

An RSS feed is just another GET request to a page, that will usually return an XML document with the data for that feed, so no, there's not really a way to identify that in a report unless you know what the URL
of the feed is.
 
For example, suppose you have a Slashdot RSS feed that gets the URL of: http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot. Obviously, it's pretty easy to tell on this site, but that's only because they provide a server called rss.slashdot.org, not because there is a set format they are following.

One generalization you can probably make though is that an RSS feed GET request is not likely to be some long complicated URL with many parameters in the URL, but rather a fairly simple URL.
This article was previously published as:
8e6 KB 285251

Last Modified 4/15/2008.
https://support.trustwave.com/kb/KnowledgebaseArticle12495.aspx