Comments on: More on Google Reader Subscriber Numbers

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:22:05 +0000

Alex, even though you don’t use Feedburner, your feeds are jumbled as well.

In the sidebar you have RSS
Autodiscovery picks up your atom feed
Subscription with a javascript bookmarklet finds your RSS feed

The Feedsmith plugin doesn’t change this situation

As to why people value various metrics and methods of tracking, if all you are doing is keeping a personal diary on a blog, or communicating with friends, I suppose it doesn’t matter if no one reads it.

If your blog is business related, reach and how efficient you make your traffic funnel are key issues.

As Problogger generally is about Problogger, it seems that blog analytics isn’t needless worrying, but essential business data.

By: Alex - blogindiversity@gmail.com

Alex - blogindiversity@gmail.com — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:06:53 +0000

Why is everyone freaking about this small ordeal? Just download FeedSmith. It’s not that difficult. Stop worrying about how many subscribers you have. Maybe you should redirect your attention to writing more efficient articles.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:23:39 +0000

I need more readers before I can read how many I have without being depressed.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:46:40 +0000

Does anyone else think it odd that this Google feed suscriber thread and related posts have attracted few comments compared with other posts of the same date on non-stats related matters?

By: * Miss Universe

* Miss Universe — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:40:41 +0000

Is there a true way to measure blog feed popularity.

If so, what would you recommend as the most accurate?

By: remo

remo — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:32:43 +0000

Darren,

That is really fishy.

By: Jeremy Steele

Jeremy Steele — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:12:10 +0000

FeedSmith is good if someone actually visits the feed and it redirects them and then they copy the new URL, but who the heck does that?

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:05:21 +0000

@Domtan: That’s bull and I’m calling it. Read my post on this today. Google Reader does NOT respect 301s. There is no other way to explain why my Atom feed, which if you view in a browser redirects with 301 to my FB feed as do all my feeds, has 55 subscribers. In fact the FB feed shows my blog with 7. That’s crap. It’s unreliable. It’s inaccurate and people take too much faith in respecting Google’s ability to determine fact from fiction.

By: Jeremy Steele

Jeremy Steele — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:04:04 +0000

Ah ok that explains that extra one, thanks Andy.

I guess the other two are just tossed in there for the heck of it ;)

My guess is maybe it is because I changed the blog’s slogan and G Reader had a bug and didn’t update it correctly.

By: Gideon Shalwick

Gideon Shalwick — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:54:11 +0000

Hi Darren

Yeah, that’s pretty weird. I actually searched for your blog through Google Reader, and yes, it said that you had a subscriber base of 8,401, yet, when I look at your feedburner readers, it says 33,044. I’m slightly new to blogging, so I’m not quite sure how these numbers are calculated, but in terms of social proof, any of these two numbers does it for me! I’m now subscribed!

Cheers for your latest video about what to do about despondency and focusing on % improvements each month – very handy indeed!

Regards

Gideon Shalwick
http://www.InternetMarketingWizards.com
Conversations With The World’s Top Internet Marketers

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:52:09 +0000

Domtan I actually use that plugin and it was mentioned in the article, you still get the splits because of the way feeds are handled.

Jeremy – I would expect only the 2 feeds showing due to the trailing slash – your auto discovery has a slash, and your buttons do not

Thanks for the link Darren – it is interesting seeing the difference with your stats because you didn’t have a button specifically for Google Reader for a long time, so people used auto-discovery or the Feedburner page.

By: Jeremy Steele

Jeremy Steele — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:06:30 +0000

I’d still LOVE to know why it displays the same URL feed for my blog so many times though. I took this screenshot the other day, and although the numbers are finally a bit higher it still displays my feed many times:

http://www.nusuni.com/blog/2007/10/13/google-reader-now-displays-subscription-numbers-very-inaccurate/

By: Domtan

Domtan — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:42:02 +0000

Darren,

You can eliminate this split feed subscribers by using a plug-in called ‘FeedSmith’.

“The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber”

Here’s the link to the plug-in
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart

By: Alex - blogindiversity@gmail.com

Alex - blogindiversity@gmail.com — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:33:04 +0000

“the fact that many blogs have multiple feeds and Google Reader doesn’t combine them all into one result to give you a true number.”

- Seeing as Google purchase’s every new company that is within one of their many categories, this element will be added soon enough.