Internet Marketing Journal UK

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.