Ok, time for me to share a little hidden annoyance I have.
Occasionally, some of the people who subscribe to my blog via RSS decide to link to me in blog posts of their own. Thanks for that, all of you - I really appreciate that something I’ve written has given you something to ponder, and you thought it was worth the time to link to me, or write about the subject I brought up.
However, instead of using the Feedburner URL of the post you are linking to, why not just link back to the post itself? Ie, instead of linking to:
why not link to:
Yes, I know that the Feedburner URL redirects to the second one. Also, this is more or less using a ‘link condom’ when linking to the site; the Feedburner URL is not just a simple 30X redirect to the new site; it performs a decent amount of processing for their Feed Statistics before sending you on to this site. Why not just link directly, and spread the link love?
Of course, if there is a certain benefit, or thought behind it, let me know in the comments - I am curious about positive uses for such linking!
Really depends on your preference… if you want our link tracking, that’s the link that gets included in the feed. And other bloggers often just lift the link from their aggregator - I don’t think people deliberately choose one over the other, it’s just what’s simplest.
The advantage to you is that you get to see just how much ‘leverage’ you’re getting from the feed; some publishers like knowing that someone saw the content from the feed vs. from a search or a link from another blog.
On the other hand, some publishers prefer to have all links use their URLs directly, without the click-tracking link from us… in which case, you can simply disable the click-through tracking at FeedBurner. (And if you’re using our TotalStats package, you can control whether the redirect is a 302 redirect or a 301 redirect.)
Hope that helps, let me know if you have other questions.
Regards,
Rick Klau
FeedBurner
Yes, it definitely depends on your preference. I actually prefer to keep it all “in house” and have my feeds served up specifically by my own server rather than going through a service like feedburner.
However, if you’re going to use feedburner then I would definitely go with the 301 Permanent Redirect–I’m surprised that they even offer the 302 redirect as a 302 really isn’t that SEO-friendly.
Thank you for your comments, both of you.
Rick:
I understand your point, and I understand what Feedburner is trying to accomplish with their click tracking. At the same time, the Feedburner click tracking is of limited use anyways, since an unknown percentage of your RSS feed subscribers will link using the regular URL.
The feed tracking would be wonderful if *all* of the subscribers could be made to use the Feedburner URL, but since only an unknowable portion (1%? 10%? 95%?) are using it, I would much rather see as many people as possible link directly to my site.
Please don’t take this as a criticism of your service; I use Feedburner on all my sites, and there really isn’t a better service for it, paid or free.
Bill:
I ideally would keep it in-house, but until I have time to develop my own email subscription, feed chicklet etc. scripts to replicate the Feedburner services, I am happy to use their stuff.
I wonder if the free Feedburner redirects are 301 or 302 redirects? If they are true 301 redirects, than I it’s not horrible to have the Feedburner URL used. However, if they are 302 redirects, that’s what would burn me.
Rick - perhaps you can clear this up?
Thanks again for your comments, both of you!
Brian - no criticism taken, totally understand where you’re coming from. The redirects are 302 by default, but TotalStats users can change this to be a 301 by clicking on “TotalStats” and then setting clickthrough tracking to be “optimized for search engine ranking”.
Hope that helps.