Yesterday a whole lot of bloggers everywhere were shocked and shaken when they saw their Feedburner's Subscriber Count abruptly plummet to about 50% from the previous day. We were no exception and were left shell-shocked when we saw the figures drop down by as much as half, we had over 1000 subscribers the day before and dropped down to 678 yesterday as you know. And we went about figuring out what went wrong. It was only after we checked out the subscribers of the other blogs that that we keep a tab on, taking a hit, we knew we were not alone.

Ever resourceful Ionut Alex Chitu has a post that helps you find the number of Google subscribers to any feed.

"Now you can see the number of subscribers by searching for the feed in Google Reader: click on "Add subscription", enter the name of a blog or some parts of your feed's URL and you'll see the number of subscribers next to each (hopefully relevant) result. This number includes everyone who subscribed to a feed using Google, but the subscribers aren't necessarily active."

Yahoo! China has launched a blogging and networking service, informs Yahoo! News. This move is targeted at broadening its revenue 'as it steps up expansion in the world's second-largest Web market by subscriber numbers.'
The Yahoo! Space service comprises of blogging, photo gallery, online networking and other interactive features for Yahoo! users.

Directory submissions are a popular way of promoting blogs and RSS feeds. However, the list of directories is quite extensive and differentiated to say the least. There are blog specific directories as well as RSS specific ones.
   
Lee Odden has compiled a list of 97 blog directories that one can submit to. Though as Lee himself says, the list is not a new ones, there are enough resources to jumpstart any blog promotion. 

Vanessa Fox on official Google blog talks about the power of community in blogging. Linking to those sites that are most relevant from the readers point of view and commenting on relevant blogs helps in increasing the relevancy of the blog. Content as always is the most significant thing of all. Good content and other bloggers will link to it.

All those who have a WordPress blog should go through the Complete Guide to SEO for WordPress by Jim Westergren. This is an excellent piece of work by Jim. A good number of bloggers out there have very less knowledge about SEO. However, with this simple and easy to understand guide they stand a good chance of acquiring a good rank with the search engines.

Google Operating System informs that Google Blog search ranks the search results by relevancy. The sort by date is also available. However, it is interesting to note the way Google ranks blog posts. 

Positive signals

• links from blogrolls (especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of "trusted bloggers")
• links from other sources (mail, chats)
• using tags to categorize a post
• PageRank
• the number of feed subscriptions (from feed readers)

Keeping in view that the German speaking webmasters community is the second largest community, Google has introduced Google Webmasters blog in German language.

Official Google Webmasters Central blog states:
For those German-speaking folks among our readers of this English Webmaster Central Blog we have exciting news: We have just launched the German Webmaster-Zentrale Blog! This is a tribute to the fact that the German-speaking webmaster community is our second biggest audience of this blog. The German Webmaster Blog will provide you with first-hand information tailored towards our German-speaking webmasters. The blog will contain a mix of German versions of postings from this blog as well as unique postings about market-specific issues.

Shoemoney has been banned from MyBlogLog. This is no hearsay. Shoemoney has confirmed the news himself.

I have been banned from MyBlogLog… Since last night every page I visit on their site results in a 403 (Forbidden) error code. I have asked others and nobody else seems to get the error but me.

A little while later, he posted an update saying:

Well, as confirmed in comments below I have officially been banned and will be refunded.

Aaron Wall has a good post about pulling out blogs from Google Supplemental Index. The methods listed include:

• Relevant and deep links
• Make longer posts and turn comments on
• Remove/downplay sitewide repetitive features
• Optimize your internal linking structure     

 As per commercial sites, Aaron says that you need to do all the above and in addition you should:

•     add an editorial element to your site to improve your sitewide authority score