Posted: August 6, 2008/Under: Internet/By: My Digital Life Editorial Team

FeedBurner is one of the major leading web feed management provider and feed statistics tracker offered for free by Google. By using and burning the RSS feed through FeedBurner, bloggers and webmasters can count the actual number of regular readers to the XML feed published. And, FeedBurner also provides FeedCount widget to let publishers display and show off the feed’s current circulation, i.e. subscribers number count.

However, low subscribers count number is probably not a good publicity. Thus a lot of webmasters use cheat or hack to manipulate and artificially inflate and increase the readerships subscription count to the FeedBurner feed. By doing so, webmasters hope that the bigger and larger number of subscribers will attract even greater pool of readers and visitors, falsefully believe that it’s a popular site, or just to blast off the invalid stats.

Thenextweb.org has published the hack to increase the subscriptions count in FeedBurner in a video tutorial on Vimeo. The hack or cheat is not by stealing the feed subscriptions count from other more popular site, but genuinely cheat to increase own feed subscribers count number, to the tune of thousands, depending on how many time you want to repeat copy and paste the lines.

To hack the FeedBurner subscribers count, simply create an OPML file (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines which is used frequently to exchange web feeds between aggregators. OPML has the following format:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″?>

<opml version=”1.1″>
<head>
<title>mySubscriptions</title>
</head>
<body>
<outline text=”Feed Name” count=”100″ xmlUrl=”http://feeds.feeedburner.com/Feed_URL”/>
<outline text=”Feed Name” count=”100″ xmlUrl=”http://feeds.feeedburner.com/Feed_URL”/>
<outline text=”Feed Name” count=”100″ xmlUrl=”http://feeds.feeedburner.com/Feed_URL”/>
<outline text=”Feed Name” count=”100″ xmlUrl=”http://feeds.feeedburner.com/Feed_URL”/>
<outline text=”Feed Name” count=”100″ xmlUrl=”http://feeds.feeedburner.com/Feed_URL”/>
</body>
</opml>

Replace “Feed Name” and “Feed_URL” with your own FeedBurner feed address. To get as much subscribers number as you want, repeat the same one line in the “body” section repetitively to thousands of lines, depends on which level of subscribers number you’re targeting.

Then, go to Netvibes Universe (must be public) to add in the OPML with literally thousands of new (and the same) feeds burned by FeedBurner. With the hack, FeedBurner will be fooled and tricked into believing that there are thousands of new subscribers to the feed, increasing the count. Check out the video demo below to detailed tutorial and steps to perform the hack.

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