Fearless FeedBurner Migration - No Login Required

In yesterday's post about setting up your RSS properly I talked about the risk of getting trapped with a particular feed service because your subscribers are subscribing to their feed URL on their domain, not your URL on your domain.

That's bad enough. What's worse in FeedBurner's case is that people may have set up their feeds years ago (or their web folks did), and they can't figure out how to access their feeds and metrics. Or, from worse to worsest (?), FeedBurner users can migrate their account to Google apps and suddenly find out that a perfectly good FeedBurner login no longer works - and can't be recovered. Not only are you trapped at this point, you have no recourse other than abandoning your feed, its subscribers and starting over. There's no corporate support for FeedBurner at all (but it's free so that's OK, right? Perhaps not...). End up at this point and you're well and truly up the proverbial creek. You're by no means alone in your paddle-less adventure, but that's cold comfort, I know.

This is a tragic turn of events for what was once a fun, supported (and supportive) service. I've written on the topic before, but as I try and provide a little help to frustrated users in the FeedBurner forums, it's sad to see so many people disappointed and frustrated by the complete lack of engagement from FeedBurner's owners. They simply don't understand why Google doesn't care about them (another instance of digital share cropping - what would happen if FeedBurner went away? Yikes...).

Sounds like an opportunity for FeedBlitz, right? Well, not so fast. People frequently can't log in to FeedBurner to use FeedBlitz's migration wizards, so they're stuck. Often, that leaves their readers sitting out there subscribed to a FeedBurner URL, with nothing that can be done by the site owner to access that audience and its stats.

Which means, as I said yesterday, that site owners have to get all those readers to resubscribe. It's the only way to get their readers off that FeedBurner URL, and the only way for the publisher to re-take control of their feed, their readership and their RSS metrics. Even with the pain and frustration many FeedBurner users are now experiencing, the fear of starting over and "abandoning" their subscribers is just too much. They give up, and resign themselves to putting up with it.  The fear and lack of access put even major bloggers on the back foot, and prevents them from making a switch they'd otherwise be more than happy to make. After all, their subscribers are their most committed audience, and surely far too important to abandon to the free but unsupported service that FeedBurner has become. It's a shame to see such confusion descend into lost hope, day after day. But that's what's going on.

Good news, then. There is hope.

As I alluded to yesterday, FeedBlitz does now have a way forward for people stuck in this scenario. It ain't pretty, but it works. Our approach assumes that you have control over the original feed that FeedBurner is polling, that you can use your blog's redirect features, and that you're going to try FeedBlitz out as a premium FeedBurner alternative.

1. First, set up your own feed on your own domain, like I outlined yesterday, if you haven't already done so.
2. If that is different from your FeedBurner original feed (our tech support can help you identify the URL FeedBurner is accessing), set up a permanent redirect from that feed to the new feed you set up in step (1) above.
3. Then set up your FeedBlitz feed at RSS | New based on the URL you set up at (1).
4. Set up a temporary redirect from your feed (1) to your new FeedBlitz feed (3), making sure that you have an exception defined so that FeedBlitz can access your source feed OK without going around in circles.

At this point you have FeedBurner - and everyone using it - redirecting to your new canonical feed on your own domain (good!), and you are then having FeedBlitz serve it for you. Which means that FeedBurner (or whatever you use) is, in fact, accessing FeedBlitz for your feed. This is the key part.

(Note that at this point we don't have to log in to Google at all, so even if you can't get in, you're golden.)

The bad news is that all the people using FeedBurner will still have to resubscribe. No avoiding that without login access. Simply asking them to do it in a blog post is unlikely to have any effect; people are lazy and - hey - the FeedBurner feed's still working (although it's a lot cooler now it's using FeedBlitz's feed goodies).

So here's the kicker. FeedBlitz has a new feature in its RSS settings that will try very, very hard to FORCE all your FeedBurner subscribers - at least the ones who are actually reading your old FeedBurner feed - to change their feed settings and resubscribe.

How? Well, when you enable the FeedBurner migration option at RSS | Settings, you can edit a fairly loud and to the point message (lots of bold text and colors) that says: We've moved, update your settings, oh faithful reader! OK, not quite so Jane Austen perhaps, but you get the idea. When the setting is enabled and FeedBlitz detects FeedBurner accessing your FeedBlitz feed (courtesy of the redirects you set up above), FeedBlitz does NOT send your post to FeedBurner (and by implication, on to every subscriber using it).

No. Instead, FeedBlitz serves the "resubscribe" message. Just to FeedBurner and its subscribers; everyone else gets your regular content. As long as you have that setting enabled in FeedBlitz it will continue to (loudly, persistently, consistently) urge your remaining FeedBurner subscribers to switch over. Not for only 15 days, but for as long as you have the FeedBlitz feature switched on. So people taking long vacations, sabbaticals or whatever will still get it. Everyone accessing your content via your old FeedBurner feed will know, in no uncertain terms, what they need to do. And they will be reminded, every single time you post, until they change.

So, although it's not as smooth as you might like, there's no need to access your old FeedBurner account to switch, which is a huge win. (If you can log in we have wizards to help expedite setup and email subscriber transfer). With this capability, FeedBlitz can basically push every one of your subscribers with a pulse over to your new core feed living at your URL on your domain. You don't need to delete your old FeedBurner feed either, which means all the old links in aggregators will work too. But everyone paying attention will quickly switch because they want your content and NOT an annoying message from the likes of us. As I said, pretty it is not. Effective, though? You betcha.

Sure, not everyone will come over. You're going to have a proportion of abandoned subscriber accounts, and so at the end of the day your numbers will start off being lower here at FeedBlitz than at FeedBurner. But what you gain is:

• Control over your feed and how it's served.
• Knowing you have a supported, reliable service.
• Knowing the people you do have are fully (re)engaged with your content.
• A powerful platform to build on going forward.

That first point is important. You can (should!) configure the message we send to FeedBurner subscribers to direct readers to the feed on your URL (remember we still serve it, because of the temporary redirect).  But you own those readers on your URL on your domain. Don't care for FeedBlitz later on? Well, switch the redirect off - done! They're still yours. They won't need to resubscribe again, because as far as they're concerned they're subscribing to the same feed.

At the risk of harming FeedBlitz's future revenue growth, you could in theory start a trial with us for the sole purpose of rescuing your feed from FeedBurner, and then cancel before the trial ends, planning on the migration message having moved anyone who cares across back to you by then. Obviously, we hope you'll stick around, but it's certainly something you could consider if you want to make that move and take back your feed. Our RSS only prices are just $1.49 a month anyway, so if you don't use our email services you're not going to break the bank if (when :) ) you choose to continue with us.

I hope this helps someone get out of the quagmire. Know that, if any of this resonates with you, at least you're not alone, and there is a way out.

If you're interested and would like help getting control of your RSS feed and your subscribers back, please tweet me @phollows or contact us via support at feedblitz dot com. We're happy to hear from you and will help as best we can, client or no.

   

Why I switched to FeedBlitz, by Carrie Isaac

After months of responding to emails from readers saying they weren't getting my FeedBurner email updates, I decided to check out FeedBlitz. As I started looking at it more closely, I not only got excited about using a service that actually offered customer support and diagnostics, I also got excited about the branding options I'd have with their custom email templates.

Having just finished a new site design, I was excited to be able to expand that branding to my email updates as well. As a local blogger, I frequently run into readers "in real life", and many times they say "I love your email updates"! I wanted to make sure that they understood that there was also a website as well, so I designed my custom email template to look more like the site and contain more links that pointed back to my site. I got lots of compliments on how nice the new updates looked!

I'm often asked if FeedBlitz is "worth the money". Am I seeing a dollar-for-dollar return on investment? It would be hard to say definitively "yes, I'm paying $xx per month for FeedBlitz and I see exactly $xx in revenue from it", but that's almost impossible to quantify. I consider my FeedBlitz subscription fee an investment in my readers. They appreciate being able to receive the updates they requested regularly, rather than experience periodic pauses in services as I often saw with FeedBurner.

I also consider FeedBlitz an investment in my site in that I'm able to monetize the email updates by making a sponsor banner part of the custom email template. I offer site sponsorship packages and it's important to me to be able to include a nice banner for my site sponsor in my email updates, which adds value to my advertising packages.

Though I'm just starting to explore the analytics that FeedBlitz offers, I'm excited to be able to look at what's working in my email updates and what's not. Rather than just "shooting in the dark", I can implement changes and then use FeedBlitz's analytics to test what works best. Which email subject lines induce the most "opens"? What time of day are people likely to read the emails I send out?

In short, the FeedBlitz service has been well worth the money! I'm looking forward to developing my RSS to email newsletter even more, and I'm excited to see what FeedBlitz will roll out in the future.

Carrie Isaac blogs about one-thousand-and-one ways to save money in Colorado Springs at Springs Bargains. She also handles internet marketing for her husband, a Colorado Springs Realtor. You can connect with her on Twitter @carriei.

   

On RSS Subscriber Counts and FeedBurner Metrics

Yet again, Twitter is burning about funkiness with FeedBurner subscriber counts cratering. The situation has gone on for too long and I now feel I have to write something about this, especially as (a) nobody from Google / FeedBurner is stepping up to the plate, and (b) enough, already.

Full disclosure: Since we compete with FeedBurner, feel free to use whatever size pinch of salt you deem necessary as you read.

How Subscriber Counts are Calculated

First a backgrounder. When you read your feed, it's been fetched from the source (such as FeedBurner or FeedBlitz's new FeedBurner alternative) and delivered to you by a piece of software: your browser; your online RSS service (such as Google Reader or Bloglines or FeedBlitz's email service); your desktop browser (such as FeedDemon) or a search engine or something else. Think of these different pieces of software as vehicles loading up on newspapers at your newspaper's printing plant. Some, like Google Reader, are big trucks and take lots of newspapers for delivery to lots of subscribers; some are just individual subscribers (e.g. individual FeedDemon users) in their virtual cars taking just their own copy.

When these aggregators visit FeedBurner or Feedblitz, we have to decide a few things when figuring out your subscriber count. Firstly, is it an aggregator / feed reader at all, or simply a search engine? This matters because search engines aren't directly contributing to circulation, so they don't affect subscriber counts just because they're scanning your feed for others to find later. The hit is noted but that's about it.

If it's an aggregator reading the feed, however, then bulk aggregators will (usually) report the number of subscribers they're working on behalf of using what's called the HTTP user agent header. So, in a sense, what that tells us is how big the truck is that just loaded up at our virtual newspaper press and who runs it. If on any one day that aggregator truck backs up several times, we'll take the maximum reported number of subscribers that day as the number reported for your feed.

For other desktop aggregators it's a little more involved, but at the end of the day FeedBurner and FeedBlitz total up the numbers and ta-daa: your daily subscriber count.

Problem #1 - Sampling

The thing is, both services report a daily subscriber count. A day is midnight to midnight in the relevant time zone (for FeedBlitz it's US eastern time and for FeedBurner I believe it's still US central time). So, for example, say an aggregator checks your feed just once every 24 hours (ish). Say that one day this aggregator checks your feed at 11:59pm (i.e. just before midnight) on day 1, not at all on day 2, and then at 12:01 am on day 3. That aggregator has, more or less, checked your feed once every 24 hours. But because it was a minute "early" one day and minute "late" the next there's a whole "day" where the truck didn't show up at all for the purposes of calculating your circulation. Result: zero subscribers reported from that aggregator on day 2.

This is a sampling error, in that the aggregator in question wasn't present in the sample used to produce your subscriber counts for day 2.

What you see (at least, in FeedBurner - we do things a little differently at FeedBlitz and I'll get to that later) is a cratering subscriber count and a good business day for coronary emergency departments around the globe. (OK, just kidding about that part).

In practice, most aggregators check feeds once every 30-60 minutes, so this kind of thing actually doesn't happen very often in the real world.

Problem #2 - Broken User Agents

Sometimes aggregators don't report their subscriber count at all (this has been a problem recently with Google's FeedFetcher agent, which pulls feeds on behalf of Google Reader and iGoogle). Sometimes user agents misreport the subscriber count. Our very own FeedBlitz's email service was guilty of this (*cough*) for some publishers a couple of days early last year.

The numbers reported by the user agents are what RSS services use, for better and for worse, to derive your circulation. GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) holds true here just as it does anywhere else.

Why I believe this does NOT explain FeedBurner's recent issues

[If you want to hold your nose because we compete with FeedBurner then here's where you want to do it]

Belatedly FeedBurner reported an issue with FeedFetcher. Basically they're saying "it's not us (FeedBurner), it's them (Google Reader's FeedFetcher)" - or, in other words, this is a case of problem #2 above. Nothing to see here, folks, move along, it'll be fixed soon.

I don't buy it.

Don't get me wrong. The Google Reader agent (FeedFetcher) was hosed a couple of times recently. Here are the Google FeedFetcher numbers for http://feed.feedblitz.com/feedblitz from the last 10 days as reported by the FeedBlitz logs:

Date	FeedFetcher Count
3/28/2009	429
3/29/2009	429
3/30/2009	0
3/31/2009	428
4/1/2009	428
4/2/2009	0
4/3/2009	424
4/4/2009	424
4/5/2009	834
4/6/2009	834
4/7/2009	834

So what you see is that Google failed to report numbers to us on two days - March 30th and April 2nd. (The large jump on 4/5 is that we at FeedBlitz discovered that, because of yet another quirk in Google FeedFetcher, that FeedBlitz was actually under-reporting Google's numbers, which we fixed for reports from 4/5 forward).

Blaming FeedFetcher only cuts the mustard as far as I'm concerned for problems with subscriber counts reported for 3/30 and 4/2. Since numbers are reported the day after, FeedBurner feed subscriber counts should have burped on 3/31 and 4/3 and then bounced back on 4/1 and 4/4. All should now be well again.

But it isn't. They're apparently off - again (or should that be still?)- today. Which begs the question that Google has yet to answer: WTF is going on over there?

Beats me.

I suppose there could be a reasonable explanation for this. Here are a few I thought of.

Perhaps FeedFetcher is using some sneaky internal-to-Google route to get to feedburner feeds now they (IMHO completely unnecessarily) moved everyone to Google domains, are using different code than they are for external feed fetching and so the FeedBurner is missing subscriber counts that everyone else is actually seeing.

Feels unlikely, doesn't it?

Perhaps it's sampling error combined with a broken agent then? That 1 hour difference between the FeedBurner and FeedBlitz "days." Perhaps FeedFetcher happened to stop reporting numbers after 1am eastern on all the FeedBurner problem days, so FeedBlitz saw them OK (between 12am and 1am) and FeedBurner didn't (because their day starts at 1am eastern), so there were more "days" when the count was zero for FeedBurner than for FeedBlitz?

I suppose it's at least possible. So I did a quick check. Looking at our logs, Google FeedFetcher reported susbcribers correctly on March 29th, obviously didn't on March 30th, but DID report numbers OK between midnight and 1am on the morning of March 31. So based on FeedBlitz's logs from the first incident I can't see the evidence for a sampling error problem either. (I didn't check the April date).

So perhaps it's just that FeedBlitz is new, and because we aren't hosting nearly as many feeds as FeedBurner (yet...). Perhaps the problem is not global to all servers running FeedFetcher but just to a few of the machines, and so we've merely been lucky to avoid seeing the problem. Well, OK, this might have some legs. But, OTOH if this is the case, it raises serious questions about FeedFetcher's QA and Google's roll out of new code into production. It's not as if the Google crew is short of money to fund these things properly. So, hmmm.

Perhaps someone from Google would care to comment here. For anti-spam reasons I moderate comments to this blog, but I commit to publish anything from Google here if someone shows up. I'll edit this post at noon eastern tomorrow (4/9) with any updates, errors or corrections based on these interactions, should they occur. If I'm wrong I'm more than happy to admit it and make the appropriate correction.

[Update: Noon April 9th - My update is in the comments to this post. Nobody from Google or FeedBurner has commented so far, and counts are broken again.]

Managing Sampling Errors and Bad Agent Strings Better

There's a more subtle question here, though. Knowing that sh*t happens, how can an RSS service avoid the yo-yo effect when subscribers come and go and user agent strings can get messed up? The goal here after all is to give you, the RSS feed publisher, the best insight into your readership.

I can't speak for FeedBurner but what we at FeedBlitz do is this:

1) In the reports we give you the unadjusted data for any given day. We report the readerships and so, if one of the "trucks" doesn't back up in that 24 hours timespan, it won't show up in that day's metrics.

2) But ... In the circulation chicklet we report a moving 3-day average. This smooths out any sampling errors, minimizes the impact of broken user-agent strings, and gives you a much clearer insight as to the true trend of your circulation. The dailies are always visible to you (see (1) above), but we believe that a moving average gives comparable accuracy with much better stability and, therefore, better results for you.

RSS Circulation, not Subscribers

Since we're on metrics, here's something else I believe that FeedBlitz does differently from FeedBurner. FeedBurner is an RSS company; they care about RSS susbcribers and that's what they report in the chicklets and on your dashboard. From what I've read it is my understanding (and, again, I'm prepared to be corrected on this) that FeedBurner does not count browsers in the RSS subscriber count.

In other words, if someone views your feed in their browser but does not subscribe (using either the browser's internal subscription mechanism or some other feed reader) then I believe that they aren't counted in your feed's total subscriber count from FeedBurner.

But, hang on a minute. These visitors are reading your feed content. So, if my assumption is correct, FeedBurner isn't counting them in your RSS subscriber count because they're readers, not subscribers. But because they're not on your web site (they're on FeedBurner's), your web analytics package isn't counting them either.

Yikes. There's a potentially significant population of "ghost" feed readers that nobody's accurately tracking. Continuing with my newspaper analogy, a subscriber who views your feed in their browser but doesn't subscribe is equivalent to someone who buys their copy of the newspaper at the news-stand, gas station, or the convenience store. They're not a subscriber to that newspaper, but they are part of the newspaper's circulation.

FeedBlitz tracks and counts these readers, because we're a social media marketing company. We care about all your readers no matter how they consume your content. Non-subscribing visitors are still viewing your content, getting your message, thinking about what you're saying. Such readers are therefore part of your feed's circulation too.

FeedBlitz therefore adds these readers to build a circulation (not a subscriber) metric. It turns out to be statistically significant. For the Feedblitz News feed yesterday (4/7/09) some 2% of FeedBlitz News' total circulation were in this non-subscribing category. If you exclude the FeedBlitz News subscribers managed by our email delivery service, this casual count is in fact the same order of magnitude as RSS subscribers from other (not FeedBlitz email) aggregators. That's an important number to understand and not to miss.

The $1.49 Question

So. If you're reading this far you probably care a great deal about your RSS subscribers and how they're reported. Perhaps you're really hacked off with FeedBurner's persistent volatility and unresponsiveness. Perhaps you're really, really annoyed with yo-yo metrics and, like me, don't understand why this should be so.

OK. How pissed off are you, exactly? If you thought about it in monetary terms, is your continuing annoyance and frustration greater than our minimum $1.49 /month fee? Or, more positively, is it worth at least $1.49 / month for you to have reliable, trustworthy metrics and a supported service?

Really? It is? Then start our 30-day trial at http://www.feedblitz.com/ (click RSS - New) so you can focus on what you do best and stop worrying about your metrics. I think we have a better service, but if metrics are what really get your blood boiling then, like I said at the beginning of this post:

Enough already.

Do something about it.

Switch to FeedBlitz.

   

RSS and SEO - Raising the Bar

When I announced FeedBlitz's FeedBurner competitor last week, one of the claims I made was that, as a FeedBurner alternative, FeedBlitz's RSS service offered better SEO (search engine optimization). A commenter asked me to back up those claims, which I'll do here.

For those who aren't sure, SEO is all about getting pages form your site to appear as close to the top of the search engine results pages (aka SERPs) as possible. The closer to the top you are the more visitors you get to your site because people tend to only visit the top few sites on the first page. The key to SEO is, first and foremost, writing good content. Without that you're sunk. But with good content you can then start to focus on keyword targeting and links, which are the bread and better of any SEO exercise.

And it's here where FeedBlitz's RSS services can really make a difference when compared to FeedBurner or the standard feed sent out by your blog.

Smart Linking

When FeedBlitz manages your RSS we collect data about your readers and can track what they click on. This gives you reach and activity metrics which are essential to better understanding your audience. To do that, however, FeedBlitz and FeedBurner (with click through tracking enabled) need to alter the links on your feed so we can track the visitors as they click. And the problem from an SEO perspective is that the links look like something like this: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/10655/0/feedblitz - mostly codes and numbers bearing little relationship to your original post. Yuck!

That's crummy for SEO, unlike the typical link on your blog, which often has keywords in it because of the way blogs work. For example, the ultimate address for the tracking link above is actually http://blog.feedblitz.com/2009/04/rss-and-google-analytics-integration.html

How then to track metrics (which is a good thing) and be SEO-friendly?

FeedBlitz to the rescue. Our links now include the post title in the tracking link. The link that appears in the FeedBlitz feed for the analytics post above is not the one I gave you a couple of sentences ago. It's actually this: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/10655/0/feedblitz~RSS-and-Google-Analytics-Integration This is great for SEO - your post title is in the link, and titles are keyword rich environments that search engines like, but you get the benefits of our tracking it and building RSS subscriber metrics for you. So now you don't have trade tracking for SEO - with FeedBlitz you get both, automatically, with zero effort in your part.

These SEO-friendly smart links appear in your RSS feed, its browser-friendly version, and the mobile version. They're completely compatible with our unique Google Analytics integration, CNAMEs and any other redirection strategies you employ on your own site.

Better yet, since your RSS feed is the source for resyndication out to third party sites, you get the downstream SEO benefits of when the post is linked to elsewhere by folks reading it in their feeds.

Better Browser Friendly

When a person hits your feed they'll get a "browser-friendly" version - it's HTML, not XML, and is much more accessible for humans than for computers. FeedBurner has this too, but by default it isn' t HTML. The data format matters, and I'll get to that in a moment.

But first, you need to know one of the things that can influence a page's rank in SEO is where the content - and the keywords that the search engines are looking for - appear on the page. Usually, the closer the content to the top of the page, the better. If you look at a browser-friendly version of a feed (try this one about Barack Obama: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/barackobamaradar&x=0 ) you'll see that the page is all about the content; the only part that specifically mentions FeedBlitz is at the very bottom of the page. Great for SEO. Compare and contrast that with the FeedBurner equivalent (here's social media mega site TechCrunch's feed: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/techcrunch ). It's pretty much all FeedBurner up top there, above the fold, not Mr. Arrington's content. Great for FeedBurner; less so for you, the content owner.

Or, in pictures, using TechCrunch to Blitz a demo feed for an apples to apples comparison, with the "noise" added by each respective service highlighted using a 1024x768 window:

FeedBurner browser friendly:



FeedBlitz browser friendly:



As you can see there's much less noise from us (and no mention of FeedBlitz at all in the stuff we add), and we add the feed's description. The other browser-friendly version pushes the content down and, the title at the very top aside, most of the text where the reader's eye falls first is all about the vendor not TechCrunch.

Search Engine Friendly

FeedBlitz's browser-friendly version also goes further than what's visible in the browser. The browser-friendly version is always served as HTML (i.e. as a web page), so it can be indexed by ordinary search engines (most, including the main Google search engine, avoid feeds in feed format, which is what FeedBurner serves browser-friendly as by default). It also includes meta tags, pulled from your feed and your post tags, for the description and keywords. Meta tags help search engines understand your content better, so having them there is a big plus. It automatically adds a feed autodiscovery link pointing back to your RSS. All while using the Smart Links I mentioned earlier. Here's the browser-friendly version of the FeedBlitz RSS feed: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz&x=0 - use the "View Page Source" in your browser to see the SEO tags we added if you're interested.

(Plus I think it just looks better for people. You know, those carbon-based life forms you're ultimately trying to reach).

Better Partial Feeds

For those who use partial feeds, FeedBlitz is way ahead of anything else out there. Take a look at the browser-friendly version of this blog's feed again. I have the browser-friendly version set up to offer partial text, but if you look at the content of the posts there you'll see there are links that work. Bold text in places. Bullets. And all the flares are there. Working links is vital for SEO, because links help boost your ranking. if the links are removed then neither people nor search engine crawlers (like Google's) can get to the content you're trying to get them to. Without FeedBlitz partial feeds are literally a dead-end; a link-free wasteland that stops SEO bots and people alike.

With FeedBlitz, a partial feed or browser-friendly display is suddenly a nicely presented, keyword-rich environment that that both search engines and people will appreciate. The flares all work (and they're not mangled either; they use your URL too, which is good for SEO). It's both better looking and more functional for people and machines alike.

Finishing the Play - Custom Footers

Finally, you can add a custom footer to all your articles with FeedBlitz (can't do that with FeedBurner). That can be an SEO-friendly link to your site. It can be a link and a copyright notice to help reduce RSS-scraping revenue theft. We use it on our feeds to point people back to this blog; any safe and valid HTML can be added.

Advanced Users - NOINDEX

FeedBlitz.com has a Page Rank 8 home page and as such that strength can sometimes distort SERPs. For advanced users who don't want our versions of their content to be added to indexes we offer the NOINDEX option on the RSS - Settings page. It's off by default, though (i.e. no noindex, or (that is to say) yes: please index this content).

FeedBlitz RSS - Better SEO

So there you have it. If you care about SEO and want a better feed solution that will help, not hurt, your search engine optimization activities, all with next to no effort and without sacrificing metrics, choose FeedBlitz.

[Reposted to address broken tinyurl]

   

How to Migrate your FeedBurner Feeds

Here's a simple "how-to" for those wanting to leave FeedBurner and switch to FeedBlitz's RSS alternative:

1. Set up your first feed in FeedBlitz at RSS - New.
2. If you have an OPML file, then go to RSS - Import and browse for the file. Pick the feed you configured in step (1) to act as a template so that all your imported feeds get your settings immediately (flares, splices etc). Great timesaver.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Correcting the prior version of these instructions, the FeedBurner OPML export will not work here as it exports the FeedBurner URLs not the feed sources (which is what you actually want). If you use the FeedBurner URLs you will end up creating a circular reference and that will make a real mess of the result.

At this point you have all your feeds set up in FeedBlitz. Now you have to start the process to leave FeedBurner (FeedBlitz is in the middle of this right now - it works as advertised).

For each of your feeds in FeedBurner:

1. Pick it from the FeedBurner dashboard;
2. Click "Edit Feed Details..." at the top, just above the tabs;
3. Update the URL there with the corresponding FeedBlitz feed URL;
4. Save, rinse and repeat.

At this point all your FeedBurner subscribers will be reading your Blitzed feed. You have to make this change before you migrate away from FeedBurner as the "Delete Feed" process sends subscribers to the URL FeedBurner has as the feed source; if you don't go through the above steps the readers won't be sent to FeedBlitz and they won't see all your new goodies and FeedBlitz won't see any readers to report.

OK, feeling brave? This is it.

For each of your feeds at FeedBurner you want to migrate away:

1. Check you set up the feed URL to point to your new Blitzed feed.
2. Click "Delete Feed..." just above the tabs.
3. IMPORTANT: check that the "Use 30-day redirection" box is checked on (it is off by default).
4. Click the "Delete feed" button.
5. Breathe :-)

For the next 15 days FeedBurner will automatically send all your subscribers and visitors to your new feed. After that, people who still have not updated their RSS readers will get a simple, single post from FeedBurner telling them the new URL to use. 15 days later - poof, gone, readers will get a 404 file not found error. Anyone at that point who hasn't changed wasn't a real subscriber in the first place.

So you basically have 30 days to get the word out (don't procrastinate!). Once you delete the feed at FeedBurner there is work you need to do to find and update links to the old FeedBurner URL. In no particular order, then, here's what you have to do:

• Post about the change and tell everyone the new URL they should subscribe to.
• Update email forms and RSS links on your site with your new feed address.
• Update third party services such as FeedBlitz, FriendFeed etc. with your new RSS feed address.
• Update any widgets and plugins you have with your new feed URL (get FeedBlitz widgets at RSS - Promote your feed).
• Update your blog bios, Twitter profiles, email signatures etc. with your new feed address.
• Change your blog and web site's RSS autodiscovery links (info on this vital step at RSS - Promote your feed).
• Update any CNAMEs and redirects.
• Update any old blog posts that mention your RSS feed.

If you do switch to FeedBlitz we're happy you're here. You're not locked in; we have a similar process if you want to stop using us as your RSS provider. Remember that you do not have to use FeedBlitz RSS in order to use our email services. But we'd sure be happy if you chose to do that anyway!

Any questions on the process add a comment or tweet me at @phollows

   

Update Your RSS Readers - Leaving FeedBurner

We tied the new FeedBlitz RSS service into the existing FeedBurner feed to simplify the initial announcement of our FeedBurner alternative. Now it's time to finish the play and move the feed over for good.

All FeedBlitz email readers have already been moved over to the new feed; for everyone else we've just deleted the old feed at FeedBurner which will be gone in 30 days. Please update your aggregators to poll http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz so you can stay in the loop!

   

A FeedBurner Alternative: Blitz Your RSS!

Update: FeedBurner Alternative Migration Tools

Bloggers looking at FeedBlitz as a FeedBurner alternative have new tools to help simplify FeedBurner migration that automate many of the tasks involved in leaving FeedBurner. The simple step by step guides to using these tools are:

• How to migrate FeedBurner email subscribers
• How to Migrate your FeedBurner Feed and Email Subscribers

Update: FeedBurner Alternative Comparisons

A feature comparison matrix is available at http://kb.feedblitz.com/article/AA-00444/22/FeedBurner-Comparisons/FeedBlitz-and-FeedBurner-An-Overview.html

Introducing a New FeedBurner Alterantive

FeedBlitz today has opened up a brand new RSS management service to the public. Previously in private beta, the service is designed for publishers, marketers and bloggers who need:

• Greater choice in the RSS management service market;
• Better branding in their RSS feeds;
• A one-stop social media marketing solution encompassing RSS, IM, Twitter, email marketing and mobile-friendly content;
• Smarter SEO;
• A new take on metrics;
• Control over content and viral marketing.

The service is available for free to anyone on FeedBlitz's Newsletter Plus tiered email marketing upgrade. There's a full RSS service FAQ available. I'm very excited about this new offering. The RSS management market has been stagnant for years, and we intend to change that, starting now. You'll see that the FeedBlitz RSS feed service will rapidly evolve over the coming weeks as we learn more about its real-world behavior, what we inspire you (with luck!) to ask for, and what we could do better at. There are more features we have in the queue to add, and we've had some great suggestions already from the private beta that we'll be implementing. The RSS service is also a business, with a corresponding business model. FeedBlitz RSS management services are available to anyone with a Newsletter Plus upgrade, starting at $1.49 per month. If you don't use FeedBlitz for emailing, that's fine - you can run as many RSS feeds as you like through us for that $1.49. You are certainly NOT required to use our email services as well as our RSS platform, but you are required to contribute this low monthly fee at our minimum level. If you do use our Newsletter Plus email service plan, then the RSS feed service is available to you, right now, at no extra charge. Your fee now includes RSS management as part of the bundle. Meanwhile, if you're reading this using an aggregator via FeedBurner or via a regular FeedBlitz subscription, as of Wednesday evening you've actually been following the FeedBlitz version of the feed already, just routed to you via FeedBurner. Still, when you get the chance, though, please update your subscription to http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz from http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedlbitz (or http://feeds2.feedburner.com/feedblitz or even, yikes, http://feedproxy.google.com/feedblitz). You can also take a look at our new RSS service right now, by:

• Subscribing to the RSS feed at http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz with your feed reader;
• Visiting the browser-friendly version at http://feeds.feedblitz.com/feedblitz with your browser;
• Viewing the mobile-friendly version at http://m.feedblitz.com/feedblitz
• Setting up your own by going to the new green RSS tab at http://www.feedblitz.com/ and then choosing "New" to begin (depending on your plan you may be asked to start a free 30-day trial).

There's a lot happening in this service that I'll be blogging about in the coming days. Meanwhile, however, the best way to see what we're up to is to get your feet wet. So jump in! The water's lovely. And, yes, this is what I was alluding to earlier in the week, and yes, we're taking on Google. Again. We may be a little crazy, but this is definitely going to be fun…

P.S. Please use the standard contact methods and not comments for RSS support (or for any FeedBlitz service, in fact). Thanks! But feel free to send me a tweet (@phollows) if you've any ideas, bouquets, brickbats or bugs to report...