This is a really simple hack that can make your blog’s RSS FeedCount skyrocket within literally 10 seconds.

If you have a blog you no doubt show off the feed readers you have via Feedburner’s FeedCount. Sometimes people don’t like to put it up until they have a few hundred. I’ve had it up since I had all of 5 RSS readers, as compared to the 300+ I have today.

It’s a great little service by Feedburner and is used widely. But it is also very exploitable. I hope that since this has come to light they might think of some way to fix it. So how do you exactly inflate your RSS reader count in a few seconds.

This is the code that Feedburner gives you to paste anywhere you want to show how many RSS readers you have -

< a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/EverybodysFeed" >< img src=" http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/EverybodysFeed?bg= ff9999& fg= FF3333&anim=1″ style=”border: 0pt none ; ” alt=”" height=”26″ width=”88″ / >< /a >

Now you see that little part where I have made the code bold, that’s the part which you need to change.

Simply visit any popular bloggers website who also displays their feedcount {with a higher number of RSS readers}, have a look at their source code, look for the feed count code that I’ve bold above, copy it, paste into your feed count code, publish the changes to your blog and violà! That’s it.

Your feed readers now move up and down with the blog you copied the code from. The best part is that just the image changes not your original feed, so if somebody clicks on your “hacked” feed count they will be subscribing to your feed not anyone else’s.

This is a dirty low down trick, but I figure the more people are made aware of it perhaps a solution will surface sometime or the other.

A lot of advertisers look at RSS feed readers as a measurement of blog success. So it is very easy to trick advertisers into thinking you are more popular than you actually are.

Here’s an example of various feed counts I made -

My original

Hacked versions - Notice they all point to my feed and not the site from which I copied the code.

via Boing Boing

via Techcrunch

via 43 Folders

via Mashable

So the next time you subscribe to someone’s feed, have a look at the source code to make sure they actually are who they say they are.

Subscribe to my legit full RSS feed.

Edit: Apparently that saying, great minds think alike is true. Before I get labeled as being a rip-off by others I’ll point out a similar article done by Net Business Blog. I got the idea for the post a while back, part of my “to write list”. I don’t expect all bloggers to cross check every idea they ever have with everything that has ever been written on the internet, I hope you don’t expect that of me either. Similarities are bound to happen one day or the other.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.