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Google and Feedburner – A Happy Ending (For Me Too!)

Google FeedfetcherIn my usual morning routinely login to the site’s admin and homepage, I realised something very significant. My Feedcounter was showing that I had 176 subscribers – a new record for this site! I was in awe and wanted to get to the bottom of the sudden jump in subscribership numbers.

I checked my website stats in Feedburner and saw some referral traffic from Darren Rowse – awesome! I participated in a speedlinking post and managed to get my article on More ReviewMe Reviews onto Darren’s site. However, he had only sent me 30-40 more uniques and this definitely couldn’t have risen my Feedcount (which previously hovered at around 110).

After reading around the blogosphere for a bit, I found some news on Blog Herald, that Google Reader and Feedburner had finally joined forces. Previously Google only reported 1 subscriber which was odd. To quote from the Official Google Reader Blog:

“Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.”

In total, I gained an additional 61 subscribers that had previously been hidden from all publishers. For your knowledge, the new Bot is called “Google Feedfetcher” so look out for that one in your Admin panels.

Looking around the blogosphere, I can see that this great news has made an even bigger impact on Problogger, as his Feedcount has jumped from 10,000ish to 18,000 and on Yaro Starak, who saw a feed jump from 1600ish to 3000 which is amazing, so I’m glad that this change has benefited most if not all bloggers. Congratulations Google and Feedburner on the collaboration – it’s made my day!

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