FeedBurner not giving link love by using 302 HTTP redirects
I’ve posted before about how great FeedBurner is for getting your feed subscriber stats. However I do feel that it has a major failing - it doesn’t give you your link love back. And as someone who loves the free links that you can get from using your RSS feed appropriately having a feed in feedburner becomes a non option.
HTTP Header Redirects
My first encounter with HTTP header redirects was when I started reading about ways to steal traffic from domains in the Google SERPs by using 302 redirects. A 302 HTTP header redirect indiciates that the page you requested has been temporarily moved to a new location and your browser will take you to the temporary location. A 301 HTTP header indiciates that the page you requested has been permanently moved to a new location. If you placed a 302 redirect to a well ranking page - under certain circumstances - you could get their traffic from the Google SERPs.
Following this Matt Cutts started offering advice on HTTP redirects and header responses, here and here, the whole SEO world took note. Discussions started about which headers we should all be sending for pages that had moved from one location to another. Google would only pass on all your link based variables to a new location is the redirect took place by a 301 and only the page that the redirect resolved to would get the creedit - and the rankings.
If you don’t use a 301 HTTP header redirect from an old page location to a new one you don’t get your PageRank passed on!
It would appear that either FeedBurner have been very lazy or were listening hard and purposefully developed a system to stop users of their RSS system getting any link love.
FeedBurner Redirects are 302 redirects!
In your normal feed, say that from WordPress, you get a link in your RSS which points to your page - it’s a real link. If you use a FeedBurner feed your link looks the same and resolves to the same final point but is sent to an intermediate page within the FeedBurner website and redirected. As they use a 302 redirect you don’t get your link love 
I’ve used the Live HTTP Headers Plugin for Firefox to get the headers for the RSS feed over at Geeks Are Sexy.
FeedBurner Plugin for WordPress
If you use the FeedBurner plugin for wordpress it automatically redirects your on-site feed to your feedburner feed - completely removing your potential for getting link love.
I do have a feedburner URL which I use for certain things but I’ve also made sure that I’m in complete control of the feeds that I output. I output onsite - the auto-discovery feed as being my real feed and I syndicate the real feed but I make the feedburner feed available as I get some benefits such as auto-pinging some traffic sources (I was having some problems with WordPress on this server and my out going pings weren’t working and this seemed like a quick fix).
Anyway if you use FeedBurner use it wisely do not rely on it as the best way of getting your information out onto the web - like every service it’s a tool within your arsenal and never rely on one tool too much.
I fail to see a reason why FeedBurner would even want to give the link love in the first place.
FeedBurner is owned by Google now and Google doesn’t care about your search rankings being any higher than they already are. They just want to take your money through AdWords. Small publishers, large publishers, anymore, they’ll take your money and run.
Comment by Jonathan Dingman — November 24, 2007 @ 4:57 am
I think you mentioned this to me before, regarding the mashups, its good advice.
Copnsider it sphunn.
Comment by nsm seo — November 25, 2007 @ 10:31 pm
You can set it in your prostats settings to use a 301:
http://blogs.feedburner.com/help/stats/optimizing_click_tracking/popup/
Comment by Dave Davis — November 26, 2007 @ 11:42 pm
Mike there is a way to disable the 302 redirect and go straight for the 301 with FeedBurner. Thanks to our good buddies at sphinn.
http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2007/04/whats_up_with_that_vol_3_seo_1.php
Hope this helps.
Comment by nsm seo — November 26, 2007 @ 11:52 pm
Cheers for the heads up guys. Am going to dive into feedburner and see if I want to turn this functionality on and start using feed burner - the results I’m starting to get for feeds from google webmaster tools have been encouraging but I think that feedburner stats may just give me some extra data to work with.
Comment by Mercury Thread — November 27, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
[...] this could be good or worthless and defeat the whole purpose of this post, I went searching to see if Feedburner links pass rank. It turns out they do and they don’t depending on how they are set up. And mine weren’t [...]
Pingback by How to Promote Your Blog's Feed | Stephan Miller — March 9, 2008 @ 4:32 am
I second Jonathons thoughts, re Google and Feedburner, but sadly things are hit an miss, and in constant flux. I would like to see this working on all links not just some. Ease of use should be a Google byword.
Comment by Chris Egan — March 18, 2008 @ 5:53 pm
[...] Once your set up click on the Pro options link and change your feed to be for search engines (this gets rid of the 302 redirect problem and changes them to 301’s - you gotta keep your link love going). Select Pingomatic and Google Blog Ping from the list of [...]
Pingback by Internet Marketing Blog » What to do if Wordpress blog pings are not working? — March 30, 2008 @ 3:35 pm