Two Ways to Reclaim Your Feeds from FeedBurner

Do you use FeedBurner for your blog feed(s)? Are you annoyed that the article links are feeds.feedburner.com URLs rather than the URLs of the original articles? This bothered me for some time until I was finally able to figure out what was causing it and how to prevent it from happening.

The reason FeedBurner changes the title URLs for your articles is so that it can track clicks on them. If you are not interested in such stats, you can disable item link clicks. With this feature disabled, the links in the article titles for your feed will contain the URL for the original article. To disable item link clicks:

1. View your feeds in FeedBurner
2. Click on the feed title to jump to the Analyze tab for that feed.
3. Click on Configure Stats.
4. Disable the checkbox for Item link clicks.
5. Click Save.

Disabling Item link clicks

I’ve seen this process for disabling FeedBurner redirects mentioned on a number of other blogs:

• Using FeedBurner may hurt your PageRank!
• Disable the Feedburner Redirect
• Blogging Tip: Turn off FeedBurner Redirect in RSS Feeds

I do not believe that the FeedBurner redirect will actually affect PageRank in any way. According to the first comment in the first article, FeedBurner uses a 302 HTTP status code to perform the redirect. From what I gather in Matt Cutts‘ article about 302 redirects, Google will honor 302 redirects 99% of the time.

Another thing you can do to reclaim your feed is to put your feed on a subdomain. For instance, I have my feed on http://feeds.geeklad.com/GeekLad. To set this up:

1. Navigate to the MyBrand feature within your Account configuration.
2. Enter the URL you wish to host the feed on.
3. Create a CNAME DNS entry for that address, as specified by the instructions.  You will have to do this through your host/DNS provider.

Setting up MyBrand

If you’re using AdSense for feeds, the CNAME will be a feedproxy.ghs.google.com address (you’ll append your Google Account signon to it).  If you aren’t, the CNAME will be feeds.feedburner.com.  Once you have MyBrands configured, be sure to update your site to link to the new feed URL.

Disabling item link clicks and using MyBrands are two great ways to make your usage of FeedBurner a bit more transparent to your readers. It also makes life a bit easier for them, if they spend a lot of their time in their feed readers. If they want to site your article, they no longer have to click through the FeedBurner link for the sole purpose of obtaining the original article URL.