Last week, I posted about the spikes in my RSS feed subscriber stats. Thanks to Jessiec at FeedBurner, I was able to determine the source of the spikes was Pageflakes. On the days of the spikes, Pageflakes subscriptions jumped to about 120 and then dropped back to zero on the non-spike days.
I was puzzled by the Pageflakes spikes so I added my feeds to Pageflakes. When I reviewed my FeedBurner stats later, I noticed all my feeds spiked up on the day I added them to Pageflakes. However, after the initial spikes, the number of Pageflakes subscribers dropped to zero until I visited my Pageflakes page again. Then once again, my feed count spiked up and then returned back to zero the next day.
Take a look at the table below. I visited my PageFlakes page on December 26th. As you can see, one visit resulted in a relatively big increase in my feed subscription stats. So, by visiting my PageFlakes page daily, I could inflate my feed stats fairly easily (I'm not condoning this; just pointing out it would be easy to do). Someone could go to town on this by creating multiple accounts on PageFlakes. BTW, TechCrunch also has a post about the PageFlakes spikes.
| Total Subscribers | Pageflakes Subscribers | |||||
| Dec 26 | 7-Day Ave | Dec 25 | Dec 26 | Dec 27 | % of Dec 26 | |
| iZachy | 91 | 65 | 0 | 29 | 0 | 32% |
| Daddy Forever | 79 | 50 | 0 | 34 | 0 | 43% |
| EDA Blog | 96 | 75 | 0 | 21 | 0 | 22% |
| EDA Geek | 198 | 156 | 0 | 48 | 0 | 24% |
| Embedded Star | 402 | 275 | 0 | 136 | 0 | 34% |
Really Interesting.I am not sure how it works but getting so much of boost whats the story?
small wonder why many feed stats of Chinese blogs grew so quickly and oddly recently,possibly because pageflakes made its Chinese language frontpage and they need to show us that they are very welcomed by the new customers.
I think they have an incorrect name,may be pagefake will be better. :)
I think this exploit has been fixed so can't spike your numbers via PageFlake anymore.