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Interesting Effect From Changing Feedburner Settings

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July 21st, 2009 by Jesse
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In a funny circle of blog commenting today, a friend of mine over at ChefPatrick.com received an email from one of my readers letting him know that a plugin I use called commentluv, which adds a link back to the last blog post by commenters here was generating feedburner links instead of links back to his site directly, not that this is a huge deal but like some others he decided to disable the statistic tracking feature in his feedburner account to get back control over links back to his site from his rss feeds.

Some people really like the features offered by feedburner for statistic tracking, but there are other ways to get those statistics without relying on links that go through a redirect. One of my biggest concerns with this type of practice would be if something were to happen and feedburner ceased to exist or any other of the millions of possible scenarios that could take place leading to those links changing in any way, and breaking. I like having control over my own content, site and links. If someone is going to screw something up, I want it to be me :-p

The interesting thing about this is what happened once he changed his feedburner settings to disable statistic tracking and return his feed links back to urls to his site. With the change in the urls to his posts, anyone who had subscribed to his feedburner feed using a feed reader was notified that all his posts were new again. As far as the feed readers are concerned, a new url equals a new post so that was that. Is this a big deal? No its not but it can be a bit confusing to your readers (and quite possibly get you an unintentional bump in traffic)

Now I just wait for those who will try to capitalize on this and change their feed settings once every few weeks :-p.. Obviously, I wouldn’t advise that but I am sure there are people out there who will do just that.


  • Very interesting, but the moment you want to get stats you need to be redirecting, which in turn means your links are indirect. All those bit.ly links have little value for SEO
    .-= Guy McLaren´s last blog ..Market research - Selling Ice to Eskimos =-.
  • I'm not a fan of any type of link that doesn't have my domain in it, however I do use bit.ly links on twitter because they save space. As for stats I also prefer inhouse solutions, I use Piwik for this site and absolutely love it. And, if you want to track links in your RSS feeds there are other ways to do that without redirecting through someone else as well.
  • It happened even if all you did was turn of the tracking? I did that, on only one of my blogs yesterday, after reading about this CommentLuv issue.

    I'm subscribed to it in my reader (just to see what others see) and I didn't see any new updates except for yesterdays post. Unless I'm missing something ...
    .-= Anna´s last blog ..Do You Know Who You’re Linking to? =-.
  • I'm not sure, personally I have never used the tracking features that feedburner uses so I can't test it myself, but I have heard from others who have seen it happen.. Maybe it depends on the feed reader you are using, I bet some of them determine whats new by different means.. maybe lol.. We'll have to see if anyone else chimes in on this
  • Never thought about something like this could happen. As a user I would not appreciate getting old posts in my reader again.
    .-= Stefan´s last blog ..Review: The Adventures of Johnny Bunko =-.
  • I hadn't thought of it either until he read your email and changed his, he instantly got a few emails from his readers telling him they had a feed reader full of new posts that weren't new lol.
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