Subscribed Links - any feedback on results?

[badbadmonkey]

I'm considering using subscribed links for a MediaWiki knowledge base. It's a fairly comprehensive knowledge base in a niche industry. My idea is to have the Google "Add our expertise to your Google searches" button in the menu column of every page, to solicit subscribers.

Because of the number of pages, creating a feed or something for Google is going to be a bit of work, so I'm reluctant to "just try it" for a while.

I've searched far and wide, including here on WebmasterWorld, but cannot find anything in the way of opinion or feedback regarding actual results of anyone actually implementing a similar program.

Statistics? Conversion rates (subscribers per visitors)? Resulting increased levels of returning visitors? Any negatives? Any comments?

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I have used Google Subscriber for one small (200 page) site in early 2008.

Did not see any positive or negative changes.... The traffic remained unchanged.

[edited by: AnkitMaheshwari at 10:26 am (utc) on May 6, 2009]

[badbadmonkey]

Did you actually get subscribers though, how did you try to gather them?

I'm guessing if that isn't pushed fairly strongly, nothing will be gained. I'm interested in how successful the standard Google "button" is... and thereafter, what the results look like.

For a knowledge base, capturing return visitors for research is valuable, so I like the idea, just not sure how it's going to work in the real world.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

With US target market, the site was ranking really well in Google.com for many important keywords, and was also coming in top results for Google maps.

Nothing specifically done for Google Subscriber except that button was added site-wide in the footer.
Returning visitors were around 30-35% in a month with no change after the button was added