Late last Friday, Google’s Webmaster Central Blog reported some additional features which included the ability for publishers to see the number of subscribers to their content.
First of all, subscriber stats are now available. Webmaster Tools now show feed publishers the number of aggregated subscribers you have from Google services such as Google Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. We hope this will make it easier to track subscriber statistics across multiple feeds, as well as offer an improvement over parsing through server logs for feed information.
I wonder how long will it take before subscriber data from FeedBurner will be integrated into Webmaster Central.
The inclusion of the Google subscription services is a great first step but there are many other services that should also be accounted for.
Subscribers are an excellent way for publishers to judge the level of engagement and reach of their blog/website and I imagine that Google will eventually begin to include results from subscription services into Universal Search.
With FeedBurner stats such as total subscribers, reach, out going links, item use and incoming links, Google should be able to algorithmically decide which sites will receive precedence for which queries.
Webmaster Tools is also availabe in 20 Languages:
…In addition to US English, UK English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Polish, Webmaster Tools are now in Turkish and Romanian.
