Stealing Feed Counts Is Lame
Posted on September 7, 2007 by
Adie 
Blogging 
28 Comments
It’s sad when bloggers have to resort to deception to make themselves look better.
Check out the code of this guy’s feed count.
<a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/InternetMarketingSucks”>
<img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/NetBusinessBlog?bg=0066FF&fg=
FFFFFF&anim=0″ height=”26″ width=”88″ style=”border:0″ alt=”" /></a></li>
Even if you don’t know HTML, you can see that “NetBusinessBlog” shouldn’t be there.
I looked at his website. He’s got some good information. But why copy a feed count to look better? Anyone can look at his Alexa ranking (238,000) and subscriber count (1,600) and see that something is fishy.
Blogging is about authenticity and reputation. Don’t wreck your reputation with lame shortcuts.
Thanks to Matt for notifying us of this.
Want to learn how he stole our feed count? Check out this post, How I Got 283k Feed Subscribers in 1 Day.
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I get a kick out of this. This actually isn’t the first time NBB has written about their feedburner stats being stolen. Matt had written about it earlier this year http://www.netbusinessblog.com/2007/02/22/how-i-got-283k-subscribers/
Hopefully people will cut the crap and show legit stats for their sites. Faking it does nothing for them.
I linked to that post in the last sentence of this blog entry.
That is pretty lame! It’s amazing what people will resort to.
Its sneaky, but its a way to get people to sign up for an RSS feed if they dont know about it. People always follow other people. Too bad he picked the wrong blog audience to try it on. He should have started a gardening blog.
BTW do your top commenters ever reset?
Currently, nope. Comment away! :)
I’m imagining a great April Fool’s joke I’m going to play on my readers next year, based on this. :)
Hahahahaha, great idea!
That’s a pretty stupid thing to do, and I don’t think it really helps them increase their number of readers… unless they get the real blog to write a post about them.
They should just swap your feedcount with another blog’s. Maybe they could get some more publicity out of it ;-)
Thanks for all the publicity! :)
I have more posts about this stuff, specifically Derek’s points, scheduled for publication this week. Stay tuned!
I believe I first learned of that trick from this website during the previous owner’s stint. You should check your archives.
Yes, it’s lame, but he had a good point on the mob mentality influence it would have for publishers trying to increase their readership early on.
Check out the last link on this post.
You might increase your readership early on. But you risk being found out and wrecking your rep.
I think I’d be more worried about ruining my rep by running a site where I detailed how to do something and then knocked people for doing exactly what was detailed.
Very good point Matt.
Especially considering InternetMarketingSucks is an entertainment blog where I illustrate and make fun of sleazy internet marketing tactics…
lame???
this is sick!!!
it means you do not have guts to earn readers with your content!!
If you report that dude to Feedburner I’ll bet they’d do something about it, especially since they’re with Google now.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s sick, it’s just an example of someone trying to get ahead of themselves.
There’s a definite attitude of “fake it until you make it” on the internet, and some people can pull it off. But you need to be clever to do so, because there’s always someone out there who is going to try to out you.
I don’t disagree with what you guys are saying, but you’re totally missing the point of InternetMarketingSucks.com. It’s all about spoofing the typical internet marketing stuff, so when you see stuff like this, it’s a joke.
The best way to think of it is like The National Enquirer or Weekly World News. They look like real news, but people read them for entertainment value. It doesn’t matter if the story is true, it’s for entertainment purposes.
Sigh -_-
The guy just wrote an article about how to get RSS subscribers:
http://internetmarketingsucks.com/blog/2007/09/08/about-freakin-time-for-more-rss-feed-subscribers/
You think that’s bad, you should see his ebook sales page:
http://internetmarketingsucks.com
I swear those earnings screenshots and testimonials are fake!
Absolutely too funny
[...] read about people doing this before most recently on Net Business Blog and as Dee said it’s pretty [...]
Good lord. I seriously hope feedburner looks at this and creates a widget that’s a teensy bit more jerk-proof.
Wow, that really does stink. Easy enough to do, but oh so shameful if you get caught.
Pretty lame considering that if they really wanted to fake their stats, all they needed to do is create an image with a fake number of subscribers. No need to use someone else’s code that is easily detectable by the owner.
[...] That blogger will probably fall for the trap and then come to your blog at least to see what the fuss is about. Then they’ll probably even leave a comment or write about it on their popular blog! [...]
[...] because of the number of readers you appear to have. You can read more about doing this at Net Business Blog. Apparently they didn’t like their original Evil trick entitled “How I got 283K Feed [...]
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