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I was surfing through net last night and found out something really interesting. I stumbled upon this blog which had 1000+ RSS readers! Hmm…Had the contents been rich, I would have believed, but hey, how could I believe that with such poor designing and such useless contents and crappy videos! I immediately tracked its Alexa ranking and further saw no traffic at all! No way could this guy have gotten 1000+ readers! I immediately started digging into it and to my surprise, I found out that that blogger was using someone else’s feedcount stats! I then started wondering…why would he do that?

I started digging further into this matter (In fact, I thought this would be really interesting to my readers as well and hence a good blog topic for me as well :D).

If you think that the RSS feed subscriber count couldn’t possibly be faked, think again!

First of all, I would like to ask you a simple question.

Would you be more interested to subscribe to this blog if it had this “1616 readers” feed count chicklet (which makes it appear that 1616 readers are reading this blog) rather than the actual “11 readers” chicklet that you can see in the right sidebar?

Exactly! That’s the main concept. The concept here is that people are like sheep; they go where all the rest goes, and if it appears that a large number of people are reading a blog, then this “why not me too” syndrome starts kicking off and people tend to subscribe! Many people prefer to subscribe to a blog only after they find that it is being read by many people.

However, faking feedcount is really easy. I generated the above image just within 2 minutes with Photoshop and linked it to my feed. So I guess we can instantly make a 12 subscriber blog to 1616 subscribers (Phew, I didn’t know getting readers were that easy…LOL)

However, people may have a doubt on that ’static’ RSS feedcount as it never changes. A smarter faking idea thus would be to edit the code of feedcount and use other popular blog’s feedcount stats.

This is the Feedburner code:

<a href=http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURFEEDNAME>

<img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/FEEDYOUWANTTOBE?
bg=99CCFF&fg=444444&anim=0&label=listeners”

height=”26″ width=”88″ style=”border:0″ alt=”" /></a>

To use other’s feedcounts in a blog, one would simply need to replace the “FEEDYOUWANTTOBE” with that blog’s feed address. It’s so simple and that feedcount will be dynamic, corresponding to that other blog’s feedcount. But is it ethical?

Definitely Not! Faking your feedcount may help to increase the RSS readers, but I really don’t think this is a healthy way to attract readers. This is the path of dishonesty, a shameless blog promotion where you cheat your readers, in which you can easily lose credibility, and if your readers find out that you’re using a fake feedcount, you’ll just look like a fool, and once you lose this credibility, in no way will you be able to regain it! And the worst part, what if someone exposes you

So my suggestion is, if you are really that embarrassed by your reader count, simply don’t display it than faking it!

I then further started surfing through Google to find if any site offers feedcount check, that can shows whether a site’s RSS feedcount is fake or not, and after an hour of search and going from links to links, hey I finally found out one!

So are you interested to know if someone’s RSS feedcount is real or fake? Do you want to check whether you are subscribing with a blog that did not trick you with a fake feedcount?

The answer is BlogPerfume’s Feed Analysis 1.1. Feed Analysis 1.1 is very easy, free tool that can help you to analyze yours or anyone else’s FeedBurner RSS Feed. So now you can easily check out whether the blogs that you have subscribed from are using real feedcount stats or not! At least with this free feed analysis tool, I think fake feedcounts will be greatly minimized and more blogs that use fake feedcounts will be exposed!

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