Who Are Your Anonymous Followers?

Occasionally, we see queries from bloggers who are unsure what anonymous Followers are.

How do I know when someone Follows my blog anonymously?

and

How do I block anonymous Followers?

When someone Follows a blog publicly, he / she gets two things:

• A subscription to the blog newsfeed, in the Following Reading List, and / or in Google Reader.
• An entry in the Following community for the blog.

When someone Follows a blog anonymously, she / he gets one thing:

• A subscription to the blog newsfeed, in the Following Reading List, and / or in Google Reader.

If you Block someone from Following your blog, you remove their entry from your Following community. Newsfeed subscriptions, though, are universally open - if a feed is available to anybody, it's available to everybody. Your anonymous Followers, as well as your Blocked Followers, can read your newsfeed - just as any reader who wishes to subscribe, without using Following.

If the blog feed is routed through FeedBurner, anybody subscribing to the feed can be counted. If you have a visitor meter installed on the blog, anybody viewing the blog using a link from the blog feed (called "reach" in FeedBurner statistics) will be logged through the visitor meter. Short of FeedBurner or a visitor meter, you won't know anything about anonymous Followers, or about Blocked Followers.

A Blocked Follower appears in your Following community (in the "Blocked" list in your dashboard). An anonymous Follower is simply anonymous, and appears nowhere.

And, just as you can't track an anonymous Follower, you can't Block an anonymous Follower.

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