Is RSS feed count the next Page Rank?
Seems like the Page rank charm is fading away and guess what we have a replacement. Your RSS feedcount that is. More bloggers are inclined to believe that RSS Feedcount is what you can boast about in your blog, and gone are the days when advertiser’s asked for your page rank status.
Cash Quests posted an article on the current trend in the blogspohere, of bloggers paying people to subscribe to their RSS Feeds. And there are more and more articles coming up on how to fake your RSS feedcount. If you ask me, this is not a healthy trend at all.
First off, bloggers (who are keen on increasing the feedcount) should understand that FeedBurner is now a Google company so, any fraudulent practices could end you up in big trouble. Second, I have to admit that feedburner has it’s loopholes and is not geared up to fight the frauds. That poses a question.
What happens to the true passionate bloggers who stick to the white hat methods(borrowing the SEO term) only? Are they losers? What is going to be their plight when all the smarties are faking the feed counts and they sit dreaming that one fine day their feedcount too will reach the magical 100?
This is yet another difficult situation. The blogosphere is an entity where certain factors take shape themselves, even without their own knowledge and just by assuming that everyone around is fair and good, is not going to stop it being a monster. This is what happened to feedburner.
Google took down PR, (at least it was felt that way) and in to that vaccum enters another demon - feedburner, even without it’s knowledge.
Why I called feedburner a demon? Well, let time explain.
Kyle | November 14th, 2007 at 6:02 am #
Interesting take at RSS Feed Count but I think this will never replace Page Rank more so when Google did the recent update, seems to me high pr is getting scarce and the blogs that maintained their PR are getting more valuable.
Monika @ The Writers manifesto | November 14th, 2007 at 6:51 am #
The thought is valid but despite this I still believe that PR is here to stay. Like Kyle mentioned, it just makes the higher PR’s more valuable.
RSS feeds are great and they act as credibility factor especially to new visitors.
When I visit new sites, I do pay more attention if the RSS feed is high.
CashQuests | November 14th, 2007 at 7:43 am #
Thanks Mani. It think the previous commentators are right in that PR still has value…but I also think that you’re right in that it’s value is fading. The higher ones are still worth a bit more at the moment, but the way Google is messing about with it, it’s slowly losing it’s value as people become unsure just how much it can affect search rankings.
RSS is a much easier indicator of traffic and I think we’ll see it’s importance increase as the blogosphere changes direction from being about search engine rankings to “paid” traffic.
Kevin | November 14th, 2007 at 8:12 am #
I think that most major companies and developers would put RSS count in front of the pagerank of a site. Also, there are still a lot of websites who have a good page rank but the site sucks, for example this one has a PR 4
Consider two sites which had been online for the same length of time and had the same number of articles, would you rather buy the blog which had a PR 3 and had 2000 subscribers or the one which had a PR of 5 but had 147 subscribers? Clearly, you would make more money with the blog with the most subscribers, particularly now that Google penalizes sites for selling text links to pass pagerank.
45n5 | November 14th, 2007 at 9:55 am #
both owned by google, lol
sofish | November 14th, 2007 at 11:07 am #
Google can make it a essential factor but it cann’t find out all the subcriber numbers…
Dave Nofmeister | November 14th, 2007 at 11:28 am #
I think the answer is “yes”. It’s also pretty unfortunate, since some great sites cannot utilize rss feeds in a significant way.
Eric Dytzel | November 15th, 2007 at 11:20 am #
Back on October 28th just after the PR slap, I blogged about this same subject. I called it “RSS Reader Count - The New Page Rank”
Looks like I am not the only one thinking along these lines.
http://noviceseo.com/rss-reader-count-the-new-page-rank/