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I was reading over on Famous Bloggers first thing this morning about how Feedburner no longer shows FriendFeed subscribers in the Subscriber count for a blog’s RSS Subscribers. DragonBlogger.com had 131 subscribers before the change and 131 subscribers after the change. For some reason I have 3 blogs listed with Feedburner and my Feedburner subscribers all only showed up under my personal blog JustinGermino.com. This made my personal blog which gets 1/15th the traffic as DragonBlogger.com and yet it had almost 600 subscribers.

Personally I am glad that this change was made and hope it stays permanent, I had written a post about bloggers Falsifying RSS Subscribers by setting up fake emails or paying people in the Entrecard marketplace to sign up under their blog RSS subscribers via email in bunches to make their feed statistics appear higher to advertisers and readers. FriendFeed was just another way to fluff up your RSS subscribers and make your blog appear to be more popular than it is among readers. Anyone can join FriendFeed and befriend hundreds of other users, even if 10% follow and friend you back you could easily take a new blog from 0 RSS readers to hundreds in less than a week with this tactic.

So at least this statistic is now a little closer to being accurate, but it still doesn’t take into account the fake email subscribers and robot accounts that still can be used to falsify RSS feed subscriptions. This is why Alexa Rank, RealRank and Google Analytics are much more accurate in showing your blogs popularity and reach among readers than using Feedburner. Anything you can “tweak” or falsify to inflate is something that can’t be trusted as a good indicator of blog traffic.

-Dragon Blogger

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Written by  (1514 Articles Published)

Working in the IT Industry for over 10 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.

Follow Justin Germino on Twitter @dragonblogger