The Google AdSense for Feeds (aka FeedBurner) blog announced that all of their links will be 301 redirected, as opposed to some that are 301 redirected. In summary, when you use FeedBurner to create and host your RSS feed, FeedBurner creates special links that are used to send the reader to your web site. Some users selected to use a 302 redirected link, as opposed to a 301 redirected link, to obtain better tracking.

Google has made the decision to remove the 302 redirect option and make them all 301s. Why? The main reason is Google wants these URLs to become “more compatible with search engines that crawl feeds.” A 301 redirect is the best solution for a search engine to determine where a URL lives. 302 redirects historically have confused search engines, as well as webmasters. So to be “consistent with the way that content is distributed today,” Google has made this change.

If you run FeedBurrner for your web site feeds, you don’t have to make any changes. Google has already made the 301 change for you.

After weeks of reports that FeedBurner wasn’t working, Google finally talked about the situation today on the AdSense for Feeds blog.

The problem surrounds the transfer of FeedBurner accounts to a new platform (and a new URL). Many FeedBurner users saw their feeds go dead when switching to the new platform; some received 502 or 503 server error codes. Google doesn’t seem to specifically explain the problems, but says the problems are associated with the migration of so many publishers to the new platform.

“Although we came across many of these issues during our testing phase, in reality we knew a lot of these challenges would not fully surface until we released at scale, which we now have and are dealing with as high priority issues within Google.”

If you’re thinking the AdSense for Feeds blog is an odd place to talk about FeedBurner technical problems, Google apparently agrees. They’ve also announced a new blog, feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com, which becomes the official place for technical updates about FeedBurner. The second post there, in fact, offers more information about the 502 error message problem.

Nice — I picked up 5,000 new feed subscribers today, while Barry Schwartz saw Search Engine Roundtable grow 35,000. Overnight! Obviously, the FeedBurner numbers we and others get have gone wonky. To blame? FeedBlitz seems to be putting out bad stats.

Consider the comparison above. The left side shows reported subscribers from various feed reading services taking the Search Engine Land feed as of Wednesday, January 16. The right side shows Thursday, January 17. See the box highlighted in red? Out of the blue, FeedBlitz appears, telling me that I have 5,177 readers.

Here’s what Barry saw:

See FeedBlitz? He got 36,464 readers, which for him is normally 1,000.

Yesterday, FeedBurner’s Rick Klau twittered that FeedBlitz was showing inflated numbers. Today, it looks to have gotten worse, such as being covered also in this FeedBurner support thread.

This isn’t the first time bad numbers from feed readers had caused FeedBurner users to scratch their heads, but it ultimately comes back to the aggregators themselves reporting correct figures.

Be sure to read our past post, How Feedburner Adds Up Subscriber Numbers. It goes into depth about how FeedBurner pulls in stats and issues that can sometimes make them seem odd.

Postscript: I see now FeedBlitz itself has a short blog post acknowledging the problem.

Last Saturday, there was a gasp of collective horror in the blogosphere as FeedBurner subscriber stats plunged for many sites. Today, it’s happened again. Don’t panic! Your subscribers are probably all still there, with Google Reader to blame for the missing numbers. Below, our comprehensive guide to how FeedBurner compiles subscriber stats explains all, today’s glitch, and why those occasional plunges happen.

Last weekend’s drop of Feedburner subscriber numbers by as much as half was a temporary glitch. Google Reader didn’t report figures, and all was back to normal the next day. Today’s drop appears to be the same issue. Joost de Valk for example, notes how Google FeedFetcher stats (which report combined Google Reader/iGoogle subscribers) are missing. I see the same.

The panic when stats go awry underscore how Feedburner is a vital tool for many bloggers, as it’s one of the only ways for them to know how many readers subscribe to their blogs. Indeed, it serves as a type of preferred currency to assemble some top blog lists. But what underpins that currency?

Readers subscribe to blog feeds using a number of feed readers (some of which visibly report numbers; some of which don’t), and it would be impossible for a blogger to keep track of the number of subscribers for each feed in each system manually. Few, if any, comparable services exist, and according to the Feedburner home page, over 631,000 publishers have burned over 1.1 million feeds so far.

Even after the explanation after the first drop, many blamed the glitch on Feedburner itself, rather than realizing Feedburner simply reports numbers that it’s given. Last week, I talked to Rick Klau of Feedburner to get the scoop on exactly where the numbers come from and why fluctuations (both the panic-inducing ones like Sunday’s and today’s, and more minor ones such as regular weekends) come about.

Burning a feed What does it mean to burn a feed? First, let’s back up and talk about what a feed is. A feed is a delivery method for your content (generally blog posts). Most blogs have a feed available by default, and in fact, many blogs have multiple feeds. Wordpress, for instance, provides at least three feeds with a default installation. Why so many feeds? Several feed formats have emerged over the years (notably Atom and RSS), and much like the Betamax/VHS conflict (or, if you’re not old like me, the HD/Blu-Ray debate), no one was sure which would emerge as the leader. Unlike the tape/DVD wars, however, feed readers have decided to accept them all. You really only need to provide one version of your feed because no matter what format you use or what feed reader your visitors use, all will be well.

A visitor to your site can “subscribe” to your blog by adding the feed to a feed reader. Two major types of feed readers exist:

• Web-based services, accessed via a web page (such as Bloglines, Google Reader, and My Yahoo)
• Standalone aggregators, accessed from a desktop application (such as Outlook or iTunes)

Your content is delivered by “subscription” to the feed reader, which serves it up to users. You can choose to make either full feeds (that contain your entire post) or partial feeds (that contain only a portion of your post and require the user to visit your site to read the rest) available.

When you “burn a feed” with Feedburner, you create an account and provide the URL of your blog. Feedburner then gives you a feedburner feed URL, like http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR-FEED-NAME-HERE. (See Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain for information on how to create a feed through Feedburner that uses your domain instead.) You should then provide this URL as your feed location for visitors and should redirect all other feeds to this one. (As noted earlier, your blog may come with several feeds by default. With Wordpress, you can use a plugin such as Feedburner Feedsmith to ensure all variations of the feed are redirected correctly.)

From that point, Feedburner reports daily on the number of subscribers to any variation of your blog’s feed. This number fluctuates and in particular tends to be lower on weekends. And then, there are times like today, when the numbers are cut in half.

How does Feedburner come up with the numbers? All of the major feed reading services report subscriber numbers. When most web-based services request the latest content from a feed that’s been burned through Feedburner, that request goes through Feedburner. The request includes a report of the total number of users who have subscribed to that feed. (The exact way each feed reader counts total subscribers varies by service.) Feedburner keeps track of the number reported by each web-based service for each version of the feed and totals them up.

Standalone aggregators do things a little differently. They don’t have overall subscriber numbers. Instead, they use a number of factors to determine how many people are requesting a given feed in a day. For instance, these services can determine if 10 people have requested a feed or one person has requested a feed 10 times. Feedburner has chosen to tally up the number of requests reported by standalone aggregators once every 24 hours (which is why Feedburner stats are updated once a day).

Why do the numbers fluctuate? Standalone aggregators are the primary reason you generally see lower numbers on weekends. Lots of people don’t turn their computers on over the weekend (although neither Rick nor I knew who these people could possibly be), so desktop clients such as Outlook on those dark computers aren’t requesting feeds.

Other reasons exist for variations. For instance, a service may not report numbers one day for some reason internal to that service. Today is great example of this. Google Reader, for whatever reason, didn’t report subscriber numbers for Thursday, which meant Feedburner couldn’t include them in the nightly tally. On first glance, it appeared that something was wrong with Feedburner, but Feedburner was reporting exactly the same as always — summing up the numbers reported from all services. If you see a big drop, you can look at break out by service (click “Subscribers” under Feed Stats”) to see if any are missing.

Finding subscriber numbers for blogs other than your own Can you find out how many subscribers blogs other than your own have? You can only see Feedburner numbers if that blog has chosen to publish them (typically using the Feedburner chicklet). Many blogs have. Otherwise, you can only see subscriber numbers for some of the individual feed readers. Recently, Google Reader started reporting subscriber numbers. iGoogle started reporting gadget use earlier this year, and Bloglines has published subscriber numbers for some time.

How accurate are the numbers? Does the subscribed number really reflect the number of people reading your blog? Probably not. Rather, that number indicates how many people have ever subscribed to your feed. On the surface, that may sound like the same thing, but it’s actually very different. For instance, if your feed is included in a default bundle, anyone who adds that bundle is counted in your subscriber numbers even if they never read your feed. And people who subscribe to a feed rarely unsubscribe from it even if they stop reading. Older blogs may tend to have overinflated counts because when users switch feed readers (for instance, from Bloglines to Google Reader), they don’t unsubscribe from the feeds in the first reader, so the original subscriptions still count (as do the new subscriptions in the new feed reader).

How can you tell how many people are actually reading your posts via subscription? The best number to go by is “reach.” Reach is the number of users who viewed or clicked on your feed. These are the people who engaged with your content on a given day. Rick likened the subscriber number to the number of people who have ever bookmarked your site and the reach number to the number who visited today.

You can get more granular information by enabling “item use”. Once you enable this, Feedburner embeds a 1×1 pixel into the feed so it can track individual posts. Some readers (such as iTunes and Tivo) don’t render HTML, so this count isn’t 100% accurate, but it provides fairly good information about how often each post was viewed. You can separately enable “clicks,” which let you know how many people clicked on the links in your posts.

Note that no personally identifiable information is captured in the view of click data, so while you can look at your server logs or use an analytics program to see information about visitors to your site such as their IP addresses, you can’t get this information from feed stats. You can only see what feed readers your subscribers used to read your posts.

If your want stats on visitors to your site, you can enable Site Stats, which provides analytics-type information about your site visitors. This is entirely different from your subscriber stats and should closely align with analytics programs such as Google Analytics.

Tips for Managing Your Feed

• Make only one version of your feed available. There’s no reason to provide a feed for every feed format.
• Ensure that if you have multiple versions of your feed, you redirect them all to the Feedburner version so you get an accurate view of your subscribers.
• Use Feedburner’s MyBrand to publish a feed on your domain so that if you want to switch from Feedburner later you don’t lose all of your subscribers.

Rick recommends that bloggers look at trends over time rather than fluctuations on individual days, since those fluctuations tend to be due to how feed readers are reporting more than reflecting actual subscription changes. And even more than that, he recommends looking at reach more than subscribers, since the reach number more accurately reflects the number of actual readers. I told him that was unlikely to happen. After all, the subscriber number is almost always bigger.

FeedBurner, a recent acquisition of Google, has announced that you can now simply add Google AdSense ads directly on your Web site via the “Monetize” tab. This may simplify the process for some folks who are not tech savvy enough to put the AdSense code on their site themselves.

You can place 300×250 or 468×60 text or image AdSense ads on your site with this new feature. How do you set this up?

(1) Sign into your FeedBurner account (2) Pick the feed you want to place AdSense ads on (3) Click on the Monetize tab (4) Configure your AdSense account to your FeedBurner account (or set up a new AdSense account) (5) FeedBurner will walk you through the rest

There has been a lot of buzz recently about Google Reader Stats are Bullshit (With Proof) from Mashable calls these statistics downright incorrect. Why?

A default feed, in case you don’t know, is a feed which is presented to users on signup. Google Reader, for instance, pushes new users to these feed bundles: instead of searching for feeds you like, just grab a bundle on a certain topic. This is a great boost for those sites that can get themselves listed in these bundles, often by striking a deal with the feedreader company or being friends with the owner.

As Danny explained, Search Engine Land has several feeds, as do most sites and blogs. By getting FeedBurner to bundle your feeds, your subscriber stats can jump up. Most blogs can’t get FeedBurner to do that, so maybe, just maybe, FeedBurner can add that feature to their console?

In any event, there has been a ton of doubt and questions on where FeedBurner gets their stats. I wanted to remind people that I covered this in detail back in February with my post, The Numbers Behind Your Feeds. FeedBurner actually wrote a post explaining exactly how they calculate subscriber counts, how it differs from Bloglines to My Yahoo to Google Reader to desktop clients, and more.

Google Webmaster Central has gone live with a new "subscriber stats" area showing statistics of how many people read your feeds through the iGoogle personalized home page and Google Reader, as well as a new look and user interface for GWC. Below, more about both, as well as issues for those tracking feeds through services such as FeedBurner.

I like the new look, and Google says it is designed to better group similar tools and reports together. Here’s the overview page:

Off to the left, you can see a box with the five main groupings of tools and reports:

• Diagnostics
• Statistics
• Links
• Sitemaps
• Tools

Select an option, and the tools and reports within that option are nicely listed and explained. Here, I drill into statistics:

That produces a screen clearly showing me major statistic types I can view.

New in the Statistics area are the Subscriber Stats:

Nice! Now I can see exactly how many Google subscribers I have for the feeds I provide. Oops, not so nice. Trust me — I have more than 3 subscribers on our most popular feed!

What’s wrong? Well, I have to do some checking (and will postscript when I hear back). But the first issue is that I never gave Google these feed addresses. My assumption is that it knows I’ve verified the searchengineland.com domain, and it also sees that within iGoogle and Google Reader that there are some feeds that match that domain, so it is automatically listing them.

The problem is we use FeedBurner. We give FeedBurner a "hidden" feed that is on the searchengineland.com domain. Then FeedBurner gives us back a URL that runs through the FeedBurner system. Because we use the MyBrand service (see Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain and Google Makes FeedBurner’s TotalStats & MyBrand Free for more about this and why you should also use it), our feeds come back using the feeds.searchengineland.com domain.

For example, our main feed is here:

http://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland

Now for Google Webmaster Central to know that this is my feed (and show me stats), I need to verify that I own the feeds.searchengineland.com domain. To do that, I need to put a meta tag on the domain’s home page or upload a special file to the domain.

Uh oh. See, go to feeds.searchengineland.com, and you’ll find that this redirects you to FeedBurner. Hey FeedBurner — I told you ages ago that MyBrand owners needed to control the home page! Yes, it really is my domain — but I point it at FeedBurner, and they make sure the actual registered feed addresses work. But there’s no way for me to upload a file to the domain or put meta tag on the home page. Thus, I can’t get this domain in Google Webmaster Central.

I’m sure that we’ll see a fix come along for this. However, that fix will be much harder for anyone that doesn’t use MyBrand. In those cases, the feeds use FeedBurner’s own domain. There’s no way for anyone but FeedBurner to register those. The same will be true for anyone that uses any tracking service that doesn’t use a domain they can verify.

What to do? Well, if you’re using FeedBurner already (it’s a great product and now fully free, so definitely try it), you’ve already got these stats. Go into Feed Stats, then Subscribers, and the pie chart there shows you subscribers by reader. Google Feedfetcher is the combined figure for those using iGoogle and Google Reader. Right now, I’m told I have 7,446 subscribers.

How many of those are in iGoogle versus Google Reader? Well, remember the Google Now Reporting Number Of Users Per Gadget article that I wrote back in June? No? Yeah, well, you’ll read it now.

That article explained how any feed in iGoogle is considered a gadget, and for any gadget, you can find the number of subscribers. Checking on my feed in iGoogle, I’ve got 1,528 "users" or subscribers. So now do the math: 7,446 – 1,528 = 5,918 subscribers are hitting me through Google Reader.

Like I said, hopefully Google will come up with a solution for those hosting feeds on domains that can’t be verified (a brute force method is to look at your logs. See Google Reader Reporting Subscriber Numbers, Offers New Publishers Guide and here at Google for more about that).

On the plus side, some sites have many feeds they don’t bother tracking. Our Sphinn forum site is an example of that. We have a variety of very specific feeds that we’ll never set up tracking for, since they aren’t likely to be used much. This new tool is wonderful for discovering that use:

Now I can see how feeds that I don’t bother tracking with FeedBurner are doing. Should any one become particularly popular, I might then decide to redirect that feed through FeedBurner, for better tracking.

The tool is, of course, very helpful for any site that doesn’t bother with feed tracking at all.

Another nice feature of the new UI is how you can switch between sites you have verified. For example, if I’m viewing Sphinn stats, I just click on the down arrow next to the URL, and I can jump to one of my other domains:

Finally, one more change for Google Webmaster Central. It’s now available in Turkish and Romanian, bringing total languages supported to 20.

If Google isn’t already showing the correct language for you, then according to this, go to the Google home page and set your language using the preference option. For Webmaster Help Center, which also gets the new languages, go over to the right top corner and pick the correct language there. Discussion groups in those languages will also open soon.

In light of Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, Google has made the two fee-based FeedBurner services free: MyBrand and Stats PRO.

FeedBurner Stats PRO gives you a more details look at your feed readers. The enhanced reporting includes subscriber numbers, item clickthrough tracking, clickthrough tracking optimization, uncommon uses, podcast downloads, reach, aggregate item uses, on site statistics and much more.

The MyBrand feature allows you to control the URL your feeds. Instead of your feed URLs being under the feedburner.com domain, it would be under your domain. Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain from Danny explains the feature and its benefits in great detail.

Those who have FeedBurner PRO accounts will not be billed for June and forward. But those who do not have PRO account will need to upgrade to them, even though there is no fee. You can turn FeedBurner Stats PRO on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features. You can turn MyBrand on by signing in to your account, click the “My Account” link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click “MyBrand”.

Scary Feedburner Message At Login from Jeremy Schoemaker reported that FeedBurner placed a new message on their login page that read, in part, that you have until June 15th to opt out of “allowing Google to service your account.”

Jeremy, as did others, did not know exactly how to take this. The first concern is that Google is now going to own your feed. The second concern is that if you did not want Google to own your feed, your feed URLs would be lost forever. Why? If you opt out, your account will be terminated and permanently deleted including all your statistical data and history.

I emailed Dick Costolo, the CEO of FeedBurner, who explained that this was just legalese. He had Rick Klau, FeedBurner’s former VP, add a comment at ShoeMoney.com and the Search Engine Roundtable explaining the change. In short, this legal agreement is just to tell feed owners that Google now owns FeedBurner.

Didn’t intend for it to sound scary, we were going more for clarity and no ambiguity. And as a (non-practicing) lawyer, I can tell you that loosy-goosey isn’t a popular class in law school. ;)

Bottom line, this is just an indication that as a legal matter, “FeedBurner, Inc.” is now owned/operated by Google, Inc… so, strictly speaking, the privacy policy is now between you and Google. We felt it best to give everyone a period of time to decide whether that’s what they wanted, rather than make it immediate on the day the acquisition closed.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

–Rick Klau Google (former VP, publisher services, FeedBurner)

The Google Blog has confirmed the rumors upon rumors that they have acquired FeedBurner.

Google said they have acquired them to give “AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users.” You can find FeedBurner’s CEO, Dick Costolo’s thoughts on the acquisition here.

Postscript: I just got off a conference call with Susan Wojcicki, VP Product Management of Google, and Dick Costolo, co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner. Here are some of my notes:

- FeedBurner will stay in Chicago, but will spend a lot of time in Google offices around the world. - 30 employees are currently at FeedBurner, but no word if FeedBurner will let any employees go (seems like they will just be adding resources). - FeedBurner has 431,171 publishers as of Wednesday but won’t disclose revenue or income numbers. - Not discussing financial terms of the acquisition and probably won’t be in any SEC filings. - Venture capital raised to date is $10M over 2.5 rounds of funding. - I asked if FeedBurner Change their name like Urchin changed their name to Google Analytics? Not sure. - I asked if Google plans on integrating Google Analytics with FeedBurner stats? Not sure but Dick added they are very excited about giving the publisher a 360 view of their readers, which includes RSS activity and web site activity. - I asked, the main advantage of FeedBurner over Google AdSense for RSS for a publisher was that FeedBurner paid a lot more. How will this impact that? Google can learn from FeedBurner on this but Google and FeedBurner said it will vary from publisher to publisher. - I asked, will FeedBurner drop the fees for their “Pro Stats” product? Dick said they are still deciding that.