The Importance of Feed Redirection

Sure, I had set up basic feed redirection. I had set it so that the feed/ and feed/atom/ WordPress feed URLs would redirect to my FeedBurner feed.

But when I saw that the Best of the Web blog directory had listed my RSS feed as being http://www.johnlamansky.com/?feed=rss2, I knew I had to implement more extensive redirection.

I had heard of this “WordPress Feedburner Plugin” before, and decided to give it a try. After a little bit of trouble at first, I got it to work and – lo and behold! – the next day my Feedburner subscriber count had almost – not quite, but almost – doubled.

It just goes to show how important it is to make sure all of your feed traffic is directed to the right place.

I would highly recommend the aforementioned plugin to WordPress bloggers who are using Feedburner; and if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Feedburner’s feed redirection tips.

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3 Comments

  1. In addition to redirecting the feed, semantically you should be doing a 301 redirect.

    I modified this plugin mainly to work with WordPress 2.1 alpha but also I updated it to perform 301 redirects. Even though I made it compatible with WordPress 2.1 it’ll run on WP 2.0.

    I changed the add_feedburner_redirect() function so that in the $new_rules variables whenever there was a [R,L] I changed it to a [R=301,L]. This has the effect of doing a 301 redirect. After that, I regenerated the Permalink rules to make the changes take effect.

    If you don’t want to modify your ol_feedburner.php file you can always modify the .htaccess by hand. Just change all occurences of [R,L] to [R=301,L]

    I know all that sounds really complicated but it was as simple as a search-and-replace.

  2. I see you’ve tried that out!

  3. Yes I have, thanks to your excellent instructions :-)

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