Bloggers are always after more stats on their blogs. Bloggers such as John Chow openly admit to being a stat whore–he checks the stats of his website throughout the day, all day. I check the stats on all my websites constantly throughout the day just to make sure things are running smoothly (and of course, watching the money come in is always nice).

One such metric that bloggers look at is how many people are subscribed to their RSS feeds. Due to feature requests from publishers, Google is now going to be reporting the number of subscribers to feeds through Google Reader.

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

Users of FeedBurner will be pleased to learn that they will be reporting on the statistics provided by Google alongside all the metrics they currently provide.

There is speculation that Google may begin using these subscriber numbers to help shape the personalized search results. For example, if a user has subscribed to the Hate The Grind Full Feed RSS on their Personalized Home Page, and they search for “How to write an effective landing page”, results from Hate The Grind may show up higher in the search results than if they were not subscribed to my RSS feed. Danny Sullivan wrote about this a couple weeks ago in a post about Google Ramping Up Personalized Search.

Beyond your search history, Google also looks at the content on your Google Personalized Homepage - what gadgets you have there, feeds you are reading and so on — in order to shape your personalized search results.

I personally have not been marketing my RSS feeds, mainly because I am still in content building mode but for those who have established blogs, now may be the time to start adding the chicklet subscribe buttons (and put Google on top) as it may affect search results. Those that take the wait and see approach may soon see their Google traffic begin to fall as Personalized Search becomes more mainstream than it already is.

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