The eBook will go out tomorrow at 12 PM my time, so if you haven’t subscribed via email – do so now via the form in the sidebar. Remember, ONLY my email subscribers get this! :)

This has been a trend for some time now, but it has especially come to the fore in contests with Blogging Idol – when the incentive is so great, people are bound to be tempted to cheat. The problem is that people cheating not only dishonestly fools their readers into thinking that they are better bloggers than they really are, but also scams advertisers (should they take them) into paying more to advertise to readers that don’t really exist. Jim at The Net Fool wrote up an interesting and controversial (one of my favourite types :) ) of post talking about how the competition was flawed, mainly because people were gaming it.

If someone’s faking their statistics, obviously you should not trust them. But how do you know? Here’s a few tips.

First off, I’d like to introduce you guys to one of my favourite tools in the blogosphere; that is Blog Perfume’s Feed Analysis tool. What it allows you to do is take any feed and run it through the tool, giving you statistics such as current feed count, level of growth and various other things. Some of the statistics are foolish, for example the one showing you what level of subscribers you’d have if your blog increased by the same percentage every month, but the other charts it provides are pretty helpful, especially if you’re a stat-whore.

Above is the chart for TUK. The huge dive is when Hostican f’d up and this blog died for ten days. As you can see, this is a regular feed chart – drops when Feedburner forgets Google Reader subscribers; hits more than subscribers most of the time.

Let’s look at two of the blogs that are currently being challenged at Blogging Idol for faking their counts.

This is the blog that I believe is currently leading the competition.

This is the blog that is currently is second place.

And this is a chart of a personal favourite blogger of mine (note, sarcasm), that is Alan Johnson of The Rating Blog.

Now, the first way of determining whether someone is faking their statistics, is by checking their hits / subscriber ratio.

If there are more subscribers than hits for the majority of the time, that should raise an immediate red flag.

Why? Simply because real people need to visit your blog to subscribe; they cannot subscribe without seeing your content, and even if they do they will probably need to see your content a few times before opting in to receive posts via a reader or email. So if there are more subscribers than hits… something’s amiss.

Blog Perfume’s tool is one of the most reliable around, and if you use it coupled with the second reasoning (see below) you can be pretty sure whether someone is faking their feed count.

Another thing you can use to glean from that chart whether subscribers are legit or not is looking at the drop levels.

As I mentioned earlier, everyone knows that Feedburner occasionally wipes out a chunk of a bloggers subscriber count – you can see this in the TUK chart, as well as in all the charts above.

When the subscriber count tends to near evaporate during one of those drops, you should be suspicious. In the above cases, up to 95% of the subscriber count vanishes for the three blogs when Feedburner has its glitches.

Why is this suspicious? Simply because it is unlikely that 95% of readers will be ALL subscribed the same way. For TUK, it’s half spread out between email subscribers and the other half spread out between various readers (as you can see in the charts).

The second way of checking out whether someone is faking it… is Alexa.

Now, on it’s own; Alexa is grossly inaccurate and should not be used as a measurement. However, when you combine it with the above factor, and it shows that a website is getting relatively little traffic… that’s another red flag. You can also use various other statistics checkers like My Stats Counter etc.

Last but not least, is using common sense and looking at the blog in question that you think may be faking their count.

Subscribers do not tend to subscribe of their own accord; they need a reason, or a killer post to make them do so.

One of the front runners in Blogging Idol saw a 250+ RSS increase since the start of the month, which was a 33% increase on his original count (750 odd)… that’s with him having made one post in the last two weeks.

It’s not like the post was a revolutionary one either; only one verifiable person (that is one person with a linked website) commented on it.

You see, a subscriber is far more active than your standard hit to a website – a subscriber has actually taken an active interest in opting into receiving daily updates. Meaning that they’re interested enough in your content to do so.

When someone has 1k+ subscribers, you’d guess that they’d get at least one, or two comments on posts? The leader in the competition (stats taken from Jim’s post) had fourteen consecutive posts without a SINGLE comment!

Of course, some people can fake comments too – like Alan Johnson is. You look at his second last post, you see 22 comments; you think, without further analysis that those readers must be real, right?

However, let’s analyse his Top Commentators a little more. There are fifteen of them.

The highest commentator is him, with 110 comments. I believe that is all during this month.

The next highest commentator is someone commenting with the URL http://www.linux.com – for real? :)

Seven commentators have no website (which is suspicious, especially in this niche – most people have a website of their own).

Two people have links that go to http://nowebsite and http://comingsoon.

Four people link to websites which appear to be legit ones.

That’s 4/15 verifiable commentators. As opposed to TUK, where everyone out of the top ten has a website that is linked to.

Suspicious? You betcha. Outright fraud? I’ll leave that to you guys to decide.

I’ve tried to put out posts that help + generate discussion. Do let me know what you guys think about this and the last one talking about how much of a failure make money online blogs are. Cheers guys :)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
36 Comments