Do you worry about the danger of giving a 3rd party service control over the most important part of your blogging business – your subscribers?

Up until today there were only 2 realistic alternatives to retain some control over your RSS subscribers while using Feedburner for collecting stats.

• Redirect Plugins – Such as the Feedburner Redirect Plugin from Ordered List

– this isn’t a perfect solution because the autodiscovery seems to always resolve before the feed is actually added, which results in a proportion of your sunscribers still subscribed to the Feedburner URL

• Feedburner MyBrand – This is a “pro” feature of Feedburner, and allows you to have Feedburner feeds on a subdomain, such as feeds.yourdomain.com

– this is also not perfect, because that is a subdomain – I haven’t seen a site do anything to create an additional redirect to the subdomain to truly keep it on the same domain, but I am sure something should be possible – it also isn’t free – great for profitable blogs, not so great for lots of niche sites

Now there is an alternative, and it is pretty damn smart…

Feedburner Feeds Stats Hack

Mark has come up with an ingenious little hack to use Feedburner stats on his own feeds with a small patch to one of the WordPress core files.

I haven’t personally tested it yet, but I think Mark shows sufficient proof that it does work.

I am not sure how this works with click tracking, feed flares etc, or the best way to use this for email subscriptions. Also the feedburner feed is still there, and that is desirable for anyone migrating from one method to another. On a fresh site maybe you could make the Feedburner feed private so that you are the only one that accesses it.
You would also have to make sure that Feedburner is fetching a feed that is different to the one that is provided to your subscribers, otherwise you end up with a closed loop.

One major benefit of using Feedburner is that their uptime is very impressive, and they are using their bandwidth to serve your RSS. For many publishers that is quite a significant bandwidth saving.

Hopefully Mark will turn this into a plugin to make it easier to use, especially with the more frequent updates to WordPress these days

It is fairly well documented that if you move a website, you should use 301 redirects to retain your old link equity.
This isn’t possible with blogspot hosted blogs, and it was thought that meta refresh might transfer visitors, but not link equity.

Wrong?

My old site used to rank fairly well for terms such as “niche website” and “niche websites”

Before Christmas, it was still being ranked well in the SERPs, and then disappeared. I wasn’t losing a lot of search traffic, but I certainly was losing some.

It is true that all the previous articles are on this domain, but that doesn’t account for the backlink equity in those search terms from article marketing and various other linking strategies.

Today I noticed that andybeard.eu is ranking near the top on the first page of Google SERPs for the same terms, “niche website” and “niche websites“.

It seems Google are now handling Meta Refresh correctly for passing on link equity to domains that have moved. I have no idea how universal this is, or whether a manual review is required for this to happen.
It is something that is open to abuse, so I actually hope Google have some kind of manual process to check to see how content on the 2 sites relate.

It is definately worth taking the time to setup redirects from your old blogspot domain correctly.