
Please do not use Feedburner service - urlwolf
http://www.garron.me/blog/why-you-should-not-use-feedburner.html
======
Matt_Cutts
I debunked this months ago here on Hacker News:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4215474>

Here's more info: <http://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79590?hl=en>

The short version is that FeedBurner has a free feature called MyBrand which
serves your feeds from a CNAME of your own domain. Then if you choose to leave
FeedBurner, you still have full control of your feeds and permalinks. I set it
up on my own domain years ago as feeds.mattcutts.com, for example.

I think this free feature of FeedBurner is one that everyone should use so
that you keep feeds under your own control and served off your own domain.

~~~
g-garron
Hi Matt, first thanks for getting the time to read my post, and replay. The
problem I still see is that even if you have your domain the link is messed
up. From your blog.

<http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/8IurStR5fXw/>

Goes to

<http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pubcon-2012-slides/>

So if I bookmark the former, and FB dissapear you will have to create a full
list of 301 redirects in your server so my links still work. Yes you have the
control, but that is a lot of work.

Why not make FB links like this?

<http://feeds.mattcutts.com/blog/pubcon-2012-slides/>

In that case all you have to do is a 301 of feeds to www.

Hope my point is clear.

Edit: never mind. Someone found this [http://www.wangarific.com/how-to-get-
rid-of-feedproxy-links-...](http://www.wangarific.com/how-to-get-rid-of-
feedproxy-links-in-your-rss-feed/)

That way you really have all the control back.

------
icebraining
Two minute search: [http://www.wangarific.com/how-to-get-rid-of-feedproxy-
links-...](http://www.wangarific.com/how-to-get-rid-of-feedproxy-links-in-
your-rss-feed/)

TL;DR: disable click tracking.

~~~
derefr
It isn't even on by default. I signed up recently (just remembering that
Feedburner did this thing with feed statistics, not knowing that they had
removed the API) and it had a specific warning along the lines of "enabling
this option will modify the content of your feed"

------
gkoberger
It seems weird that he uses blog-centric companies (TechCrunch, etc) as
examples of companies that do, and non-blog-centric companies (GitHub, etc) as
examples that don't.

TechCrunch/etc cares about the statistics FeedBurner offers since that is
their core product, whereas GitHub/etc probably don't care that much.

~~~
james-skemp
Exactly right. I think the post is wrong, so I might be bias, but the examples
were rather lacking.

------
freshhawk
Why? Just because every other time people gave complete control over their
data and content it turned out be a bad idea and the the internet itself was
invented to avoid this problem?

But it's different now, the companies involved are the ones I've read about
since I was young and are therefore trustworthy and permanent. I know older
people thought the same thing and turned out to be wrong every single time,
but this time it's different. Why is it different? Uh ... I'll get back to you
on that.

------
caseysoftware
The same applies to all of the link shorteners too. I've often wondered how
much of the web would break if TinyUrl and Bit.ly closed.

~~~
graue
This kind of already happened, in 2009: the URL shortener tr.im closed. Once
in a while I still run across a broken tr.im link.

<https://www.macworld.com/article/1142188/trim_twitter.html>

------
readme
For a serious blogger, Feedburner is a great way to reduce the traffic on your
server. Many RSS readers are poorly developed and will hammer your server for
no reason. Jeff Atwood wrote a great article about this a while back:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/reducing-your-
websi...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/reducing-your-websites-
bandwidth-usage.html)

------
Roelven
This is a bit of an old discussion.

I think it's a fair tradeoff for content-centric companies to have feedburner
(now google) rewrite those links to get some very useful stats in return. This
was already happening pre-acquisition and only got better afterwards.

Links get indexed quicker and get submitted to reader / google news for free.

------
yifanlu
Is there some kind of analytics service that google provides with this? If so,
can you turn it off?

~~~
dchest
Yes and yes.

The whole reason for existence of FeedBurner is analytics. The links are used
to track clicks; you can turn it off.

------
beambot
I've never seen this happen -- at least with CNAME'd feeds. Can anyone else
confirm?

~~~
dchest
This is an option that allows tracking clicks on the links. I believe it was
turned off by default when I signed up.

<http://i.imgur.com/MqMBS.png>

------
desbest
I prefer Feedburner links because all they do is redirect. I have no problems
with the t.co redirect that Twitter has. It's the same thing.

------
geargrinder
By all means provide an RSS feed on your site. But Feedburner can help get
your pages indexed in Google (and other search engines).

~~~
rhizome
Is that difficult without Feedburner?

------
stevencorona
Does anyone have any experience with some FeedBurner competitors that they'd
recommend? I'd be happy to pay.

~~~
rcaroe
I work at FeedBlitz and we have support (giant improvement over FeedBurner),
analytics, integration with other social media for RSS distribution, easy-to-
enable triggers and parsers to make the RSS part of integrated marketing
communications.

------
pbiggar
Zero evidence, no credible reason not to use it. Suggesting that Google might
sell feedburner to someone who then shuts it down is laughable.

~~~
aneth4
That rather shortsighted. All companies, as well as governments, eventually
hit financial trouble, and some day fail.

Google has shut down many services and "broke the internet" before - what they
essentially did with Reader.

Even if it takes 100 years, we don't want the internet archives to be broken.

~~~
pbiggar
I think it's shortsighted to design your architecture for Google failing as a
company. Google will be around far longer than either of us.

I'm not sure what you mean about Reader though?

