Is it easy to fake Feedburner RSS counts? Is it possible to gain 2000 readers in a day? Have you seen those rising Feedburner RSS counts on your competitor blogs while you struggle to get a few subscribers. It turns out that people are cheating away to actively create huge Feedburner chicklet counts and its all too easy.
Easy Hack: Increase Feedburner RSS Counts
Techcrunch provides an insight into how the guys at Next Web demonstrated an increased Feedburner feedcount from 43 subscribers to 2500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page, and FeedBurner counted them as separate subscribers! See this video on how they did it…
With Feedcount becoming a benchmark of a blog’s popularity, the common way people used to fake Feedburner count was by copying the code from a popular site and pasting it as theirs. But it was easy to catch. This method is really something Netvibes and Feedburner will need to fix soon so that people stop gaming and cheating the feedcount system.
Suddenly my trust in those 100K feedcounts has diminished. Its obvious that Feedburner or Netvibes would fix this bug ASAP, and then it would be interesting to see which blogs had a huge fall in feed subscriber count…