This is a guest entry by Jean-Baptiste Jung from Cats Who Blog.

Feedburner, the popular RSS tool, is used by many bloggers to serve feeds to their readers, but also in order to know how many people are currently subscribing to their blog using RSS. Despite the fact it can be easily hijacked, RSS subscriber count is one of the ways used to measure the popularity of a blog.

Back in 2008, Feedburner was bought by Google. It sounded interesting at first, but no significant improvements were made to the service, and shortly after Google took ownership, a major problem occurred, and millions of blogs saw their count dive from 5000 to 500.

Since last month, I have seen my subscriber count going up and down every day and show unrealistic numbers.
Look at the screenshort below:

On June 12, CatsWhoBlog had 1,730 RSS readers. Three days later, it had 1,110. And on June 21, according to Feedburner, only 437 were still reading my blog. read more

This is a guest post is by Ann Smarty, founder of a community of guest bloggers: My Blog Guest and first contribution as part of a new My Blog Guest – Splashpress Media partnership.

I used to be highly advocative of guest blogging as an effective link building strategy. I used to tell people that this way they could get a quality link back from a high-authority website for free. I used to say, these links (coming from high-quality content) are well-deserved and thus can’t be frowned upon by Google.

But now I wish I hadn’t said that.

Like many other things done online to promote yourself, the concept of guest blogging as the way to build links is being so much abused that it makes me shudder.

People go around spreading poor-quality content (even paying sometimes to get it posted on the blog) and call that "guest posting". They send spam guest posting pitches and tell you they would "guest post for you for free" (never trust a spammer offering you anything for free. Spammers have nothing of value to offer!).

Now I am telling you: Don’t build links using guest posts. Forget about links. read more

If I had just one SEO tip to recommend to my fellow bloggers, it would be to write guest posts.

I recommend guest posting because link building is so important in SEO. Many webmasters neglect to build links so you’ll have a competitive advantage if you guest post. And the quantity and quality of your backlinks is the most important factor to ranking well for a wide variety of keywords and the competitive keywords with high search volume.

Sure, you can try other link building methods but these days guest posting gives you the best return for your time.  Here are a couple reasons why. read more