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Apr. 24, 2007 at 6:02pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan

The Blogs & Search Blogs With The Most Readers

Which blogs have the most feed subscribers from Self Made Minds is an excellent rundown on top blogs according to the number of RSS or feed subscribers they have, according to FeedBurner. Search Marketing Blogs by RSS Subscribers from Lee Odden at the Online Marketing Blog takes the idea and focuses it on search blogs. Below, a bit more on how this starts to turn FeedBurner counts into a preferred currency for blogs seeking respect -- plus how to tap into the feed counts for some FeedBurner-hosted feeds, even if they aren't published online.

FeedBurner is a great feed management service that among many other things provides estimates about how many subscribers take your feed. If you don't use FeedBurner yourself, you probably recognize these subscribers counts from the "FeedCount chicklet" that some sites use to share their own counts with the public. For example, here's our own FeedCount chicklet:

See how we have 9,704 readers as of today, for our main Search Engine Land feed?

Self Made Minds visited a variety of sites to see if they posted chicklets and then listed them in order of most readers to fewest (currently, we're 38th on the top 100 list there). Online Marketing Blog focused only on search blogs and added a few that weren't on the Self Made Minds list.

John Battelle's Search Blog comes up first on that list of search blogs, with 67,893 readers as of today. My old site, the Search Engine Watch Blog, comes in second at 23,347 readers. Problogger and CopyBlogger come third and fourth, then Search Engine Land gets ranked fifth.

If you consider Problogger and CopyBlogger not to be search-specific enough, then Search Engine Land rises to third. Woohoo! We've been going for just over four months, so I'm pretty happy with that. Want to help? Take our feed! Full details here, or just dive in with this:

What if you get to a site but don't see a FeedCount chicklet listed? If they use FeedBurner -- AND IF THEY'VE ENABLED FEEDCOUNT INTERNALLY -- then you can do this.

The chicklet is an image that comes from FeedBurner, and you can call it up in your browser like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/UNIQUE-FEED-NAME

See that UNIQUE-FEED-NAME part? Now you need to find someone using FeedBurner, which is usually pretty easy. The generally show the FeedBurner domain in their feed URL. For example, if I go over to Pronet Advertising and click on their big feed icon, I see their feed URL like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PronetAdvertising

See the last part in bold, after the slash? That's their unique FeedBurner feed ID. No one else can use that ID. So you take that ID and put it into the image code I showed earlier:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/PronetAdvertising

Alternatively, just take the original feed URL and insert /~fc after the feedburner.com part like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/PronetAdvertising

Enter the URL into your browser, and the image will load with the feed's current count.

Remember, this only works if someone has enabled FeedCount. It's helpful especially if a site had a chicklet up at one point but later removed it, and you still want to see counts.

Now to the currency part. Want to be in Self Made Mind's list? Want to be in Online Marketing Blog's list? Want to be in any of the similar lists that will no doubt spring up? You'll need to have a FeedBurner FeedCount. No FeedCount, no inclusion. And so FeedBurner's counts might find themselves inching closer to being the currency of choice for feed subscriber reporting.

Trying to understand more about how subscribers numbers are created, how they can be influenced and using FeedBurner in general? Here are three key articles from us to check out:

• The Numbers Behind Your Feeds
• Google Reader Reporting Subscriber Numbers, Offers New Publishers Guide
• Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain

Oh -- and take our feed!

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By Danny Sullivan Permalink Jump To Comments See Related Stories In: SEM Industry: Blogs & Forums, SEO: Blogs & Feeds, Stats: Popularity

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