I've been thinking this over and was wondering if the number of RSS Subscribers you have affect your search engine rankings. And do search engines take into account the number of RSS Subscribers a site has?
How would the search engines know how many subscribers your site have, unless you don't user feedburner or something? I'm pretty sure this does not infect your rankings.
It doesn't affect your rankings. There's no way for someone to know how many subscribers you have unless you display the Feedburner chicklet in your sidebar or on your site somewhere. All Google knows is how many people are subscribed to your site via Google Reader, and that's about it. Well - Google does own Feedburner too - but it makes no difference still.
Cypherus, I wouldn't be so sure - remember Google owns feedburner now... I think at the moment it doesn't have such a big effect but in the future the effect of factors like this (factors that indicate a high quality/authority of your pages) will come into play as being influential in the SERPS more and more. But the question is also kinda weird - if people said no, does that mean you'd try and get less subscribers? Or if they said yes, will you try and get more subs? If the latter, aren't you trying to get more subs anyway? I'm guessing it was just out of curiosity. Anyway, hope that helps mate. Andrew
Not so sure about that. Feedburner would never score the big fishes like NY Times, CNN etc. Would that infect their ranking by ranking them lower because Google can't count your subscribers? And then we have sites who don't even have a rss feed, like company sites, informative sites, shops etc. Would they rank less because google can count their readers either in feedburner or Google reader? I don't think we'll see any of this within the near future at least. But anyway, at the moment, it doesn't influent your rankings. Why would anyone try to get less subscribers? Maybe they would'nt try that hard to get more subscribers.