An Evil Way to Increase RSS Stats
Posted by Jon Lee in Site stuff, Web Development, tags: caching, digg, Feedburner, firefox, RSSEarlier this week I wrote a post discussing why a huge spike in traffic will cause an abnormal spike in RSS readership. All the theories I suggested are just that, theories. So I set out to do a little experiment to see if I could prove any of my theories and I happened to come up with an evil way to increase your RSS stats.
RSS Hits vs RSS Subscribers
First of all, there is a difference between RSS hits and RSS subscribers. A person that clicks on your feed is considered an RSS hit, not a subscriber! A subscriber is someone who has “subscribed” to your feed with a feed reader (Google Reader, Live Bookmarks etc.)
Before I get to what the evil way is, let’s look at a couple graphs.
The first blue spike is from my Starcraft post that got dugg. Notice there is no appreciable increase in hits to my RSS feed. With the current scale, it is hard to see the increase in RSS subscribers so I’ve included a second graph showing just the RSS subscribers.
Here you can see that the number of RSS subscribers did indeed spike. The green bar that is present in both graphs is when I implemented a small change to my site in an attempt to prove one of my aforementioned theories.
Warning, Math Ahead!
Performing a linear regression on the visitor, RSS hit and RSS subscriber data, I was able to determine with statistical confidence that the change I made was statistically significant in increasing the number of RSS subscribers and highly statistically significant in increasing the number of RSS hits. The p-values are 0.0232 and 0.0017 respectively. First year statistics finally comes in useful!
Plain English
You can probably see this from the first graph but what the math is saying is that the change I implemented had a direct effect on my RSS stats — both hits and subscribers went up but the effect is larger on hits than subscribers.
The Secret Evil Change
So what’s the secret? This is directly related to my second theory from the previous post. By default, Firefox has the “network.prefetch-next” variable set to true. When set to true, this tells Firefox to prefetch any links that a web page tells it to. So by adding a little HTML tag to my blog, I was able to tell all these Firefox browsers to prefetch my Feedburner feed. Essentially, this gets the visitor’s browser to click on and load my feed in the background without their knowledge. Here’s the code to place in the <head></head> section of your site:
<link rel=”prefetch” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/jonlee” />
Theory Proved? Not really.
Technically speaking, increasing your RSS hits should have no effect on your RSS subscribers. This is the part that is still a mystery to me. It would appear that for some reason, some of these Firefox visitors have some sort of “auto-subscribe” feature that will allow them to subscribe to a feed with just a click. Feedburner seems to have an explanation. This is what they say about Firefox 1.x:
Because of how the browser operates, version 1 of Firefox might be overstating the number of Live Bookmarks subscribers and some casual visitors may be counted as subscribers. This is fixed in version 2 and will show up as a separate entry called “Firefox Live Bookmarks”.
So maybe it is a Firefox 1.x issue? And by including the prefetch link, these browsers are being interpreted as subscribers without actually subscribing. It should be noted that the prefetch function works in all versions of Firefox 0.6 and above.
Disclaimer
This was just an experiment and I am not encouraging the use of this “evil” method to boost your RSS stats. This would not provide a true statistic of your readership and these “false subscribers” drop off the list after a few days anyway so it’s not a permanent solution. The best way to increase your RSS stats is still to write interesting content!
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Really “evil” trick! I hope it works on my site!