Comments on: Using FeedBurner may hurt your PageRank!

By: Jagdu

Jagdu — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:18:35 +0000

Doing exactly what you said, it was easy to fix. For me, the link on the bottom left says, “FeedBurner Stats PRO”. Change that and you’re good to go.

By: aaron

aaron — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:48:35 +0000

They seem to have addressed this and now have an option to optimize for search engines.

By: Partz Partzescu

Partz Partzescu — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:11:57 +0000

Thank you very much this post helped me because i couldnt find the setting that did this to my feed links now i fixed it

By: ReviewSaurus

ReviewSaurus — Thu, 17 May 2007 08:58:57 +0000

So I guess that Rick’s explanation clears up things and that it will not effect the pagerank…

By: Mike Malone

Mike Malone — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:20:44 +0000

Yea, I don’t know why TotalStats uses 302 redirects by default. The difference is that a 302 redirect is supposed to be “Temporary,” while a 301 is supposed to be “Permanent.” Feedburner may be using the 302 redirect if they want to be able to redirect a link to a different URL without being non-compliant, but I’m just speculating.

By: Binny V A

Binny V A — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:13:01 +0000

@Mike
I always thought that we should use 301 redirects if we are moving a page. Thanks for the Matt Cutts link.

@Rick Klau
I did not know that TotalStats support 301 redirects - thanks for sharing.

By: Rick Klau

Rick Klau — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:52:15 +0000

Hi - You have another option: anyone who uses TotalStats has the option of making the clickthrough URL a 301 redirect, which will transfer any link currency from the clickthrough URL to the destination URL. Some publishers like being able to differentiate clicks generated via the feed vs. other clicks, and this feature helps them do that. On the other hand, if, as you’ve done, you determine that you don’t want any potential confusion - then you just disable the clickthrough service.

Hope that helps,

Rick

—–
Rick Klau
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner
rickk@feedburner.com
AIM/Y!/Skype: RickKlau

By: Mike Malone

Mike Malone — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:25:30 +0000

Hey,

Actually, all of the major search engines treat off-domain redirects as direct links to the destination page (the page that is redirected to), so feedburner’s tracking URLs won’t hurt your pagerank. I just tested the URL you put in your post, and it looks like feedburner is using a 302 redirect:

mmalone@sunix:~$ echo -e “GET /~r/bin-blog/~3/114722273/ HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n” | nc feeds.feedburner.com 80
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 15:13:27 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 mod_jk/1.2.18
X-FB-Host: chi-write7
Location: http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2007/05/jus5-light-weight-cms/
Content-Length: 0
P3P: CP=”ALL DSP COR NID CUR OUR NOR”
Keep-Alive: timeout=20, max=89
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: NSC_gffe-iuuq-mc-wtfswfs=8efb33ff3660;expires=Thu, 10-May-07 15:17:31 GMT;path=/

Check out Matt Cutt’s article on 302 redirects. Matt is a Google software engineer, so he knows what he’s talking about :). Bottom line: I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Whether people link directly, or link through the 302 redirect the pagerank will be applied to your site.

I’m not sure how technorati, or even Wordpress (pingbacks/trackbacks) treat redirects, but I’d imagine they follow redirects as well. It’s pretty much standard practice to follow redirects, since they’re part of the HTTP protocol.