An Evil Way to Increase RSS Stats

The Secret Evil Change

So what’s the secret? This is directly related to my 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/PersonalFinanceManagementAndPlanning" / >

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!