Earlier today I was running a small SEO audit on a small WordPress site and I noticed that all Feedburner links were 302ing. This means that the search engines only view them as temporarily moved. So I looked under the hood and saw that the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin was installed. Apparently this plugin uses 302s to redirect the feed. So I went in and edited the plugin to handle 301s. You can download my edited version below.
Download FeedBurner FeedSmith 301 Redux
Hope you enjoy!
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4 Comments
Anita Campbell on August 8, 2011 at 4:40 pm.
Hi Joe, congrats on improving this plugin, which I learned about thru Skitzzo’s tweet. But a question on this: why does the 301 vs 302 redirect issue matter for an RSS feed? I understand the difference between the two in general. However, I am not sure I’m grasping the significance as it relates to a feed. Just wondering why it matters … figured I’d go straight to the source and ask.
Anita
Joe Hall on August 8, 2011 at 6:51 pm.
I like thinking of an RSS feed as another page on your web site. Which means that all of the links are additional internal links for your site. And because RSS is based on XML it should work the same way a XML site map does. All of this improves crawl-ability, internal links, and indexation. But, here’s the really cool thing about services like Feedburner, they are on a different domain, which means that the page that was once a part of your site, is now on a different domain, which means more external links.
Either way we want the engines to be crawling and indexing our feeds to make the links and content accessible to updates and rankings.
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JR Oakes on August 12, 2012 at 7:00 pm.
I think it is interesting that 0 sites with feeds.feedburner.com (http://screencast.com/t/sBEHmR1oPrn) are indexed and 42,800 sites with feeds2.feedburner.com (http://screencast.com/t/iH728ldVod) are indexed.
I also noticed a few weeks ago that searchenginejournal uses a 307 (http://screencast.com/t/0Zoubh81I) any idea about that?
JR