FeedBurner and Google

Since I redesigned this website I have paid more attention to the traffic that it receives, how well it gets indexed by the main search engines; Google, MSN and Yahoo and also what the visitors are looking at when they get to my website. This is all with the intention that I can improve the content on my website and make it more relevant if necessary.

One other service that I have also been monitoring statistics on is FeedBurner. Whilst I had it ‘burning’ my feeds in the previous version of this website, I rarely used it to see who was subscribing and what was being read. However since the redesign I have been monitoring the statistics like a hawk trying to increase my number of subscribers.

As a result of all of this I have on occassion searched for my content using common phrases not specific to what I have written in order to see whereabouts it ranks. One thing that I have noticed is that my FeedBurner feed tends to rank very highly almost immediately after a post has been published.

For example, the RSPB LearnBirds portfolio article I have just added to the website, it currently ranks 3rd in Google when searching for “rspb learnbirds” and it was submitted just 30 minutes ago. Granted, there are only 55 listings for the phrase, but it seems that Google place a preference on freshness over link networking and other SEO practises.