Is Feedburner Siphoning Your Link Juice?

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 by Jeremy Luebke

Is Feedburner Siphoning Your Link Juice?

While browsing today’s SEL SearchCap I noticed a pattern. Out of the 58 external stories linked to, 28 of them linked directly to a FeedBurner feed and not to the actual content on the site. That’s 40% of the stories that did not receive any link juice from Search Engine Land.

Some may ask why SEL would link that way. It’s not their fault. The 28 blogs blogs in question have click tracking enabled on their FeedBurner RSS feed. It’s a very nice feature but unless the feed click stats are a life and death stat for your business model I would recommend you turn it off.

By having FeedBurner click tracking turned on, not only are you losing out on link juice from legit sites that use your feed for link references, you are also losing out on links from all the sites scraping your content. If your going to get scraped, you might as well get some link juice out of it.

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14 comments on “Is Feedburner Siphoning Your Link Juice?”

Andy Beal Says:

April 24th, 2007 at 8:49 pm

And Jeremy’s kind enough not to point out that we were one of those sites who had click tracking switched on.

All fixed now, thanks Jeremy.
Jeremy Luebke Says:

April 24th, 2007 at 11:46 pm

At least MP wasn’t the only one
Matt McGee Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 1:42 am

I’ve been noticing this, too. I do a weekly link roundup on my blog, and I always take the time to click through to the site so I can get the actual URL rather than the Feedburner version. I know Danny and Barry are Super Busy, but still … I dunno … maybe they could at least click through and grab the actual URL for those of us who are SEL columnists? Hehehe….

I’m thinking about adding the actual URL in small font size to the start of every post to make it

1) easier for anyone to grab the URL for linking purposes, and
2) easier for people reading scraper sites to know the real source of the post.

Surely there’s a way to automate this in PHP … shame I don’t know it!
Who knows PHP? I have an idea for a WP plug-in… » Small Business SEM Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 1:52 am

[...] Jeremy L. wrote tonight at Marketing Pilgrim about something I’ve noticed, too: Many of the outbound links in the Search Recap posts on Search Engine Land use the Feedburner URL, not the URL of the actual post. This, of course, provides the blog being linked to with zero link juice. [...]
Dario Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 6:57 am

Thanks for the tip! Good thing I didn’t have it on. I can still get that info out of Google Analytics, though.
David Dalka Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 9:49 am

I think a bigger issue is that Google seems to ignore the No Index feature.
Jordan McCollum Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 10:04 am

Just in case you’re like me and will spend forever clicking around FeedBurner looking for it, you turn this off under Analyze > StandardStats.
Drew Stauffer Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

Thanks for telling where it is in FeedBurner Jordan. Save me sometime on turning a bunch of things off and on hahaha
Joost de Valk Says:

April 25th, 2007 at 3:19 pm

You can btw make FeedBurner use a 301 instead of a 302, this page shows you how. Makes tracking a tiny bit less accurate, but preserves your PR.
Advice to mom bloggers: RSS | MamaBlogga Says:

April 26th, 2007 at 12:29 am

[...] Also, look at another post from Marketing Pilgrim (and no, this one’s not by me, it’s by Jeremy Luebke) on why you should not use click tracking on FeedBurner (read on the comments to see how to fix that). Anybody out there quite proficient in MT/Typepad? I started on Blogger and had to learn WordPress for work before I made the switch to WordPress here on MamaBlogga. If anyone can give some pointers on the same issues on TypePad, it would be appreciated! Tags:blogger wordpress [...]
links for 2007-04-26 « My Weblog Says:

April 26th, 2007 at 6:32 am

[...] Is Feedburner Siphoning Your Link Juice? | Marketing Pilgrim (tags: feedburner rss web20 seo money) [...]
Jason Schramm Says:

May 11th, 2007 at 11:05 am

I just turned off the feature. I don’t get many hits, so it wasn’t really useful for me anyway. Adds a little transparency.
Chris Says:

August 22nd, 2007 at 1:06 pm

The way to turn off the click thru feature has changed — I spent a lot of time clicking around Feedburner before I figured it out. The item to look for is “Feedburner Stats” with a blue “PRO” image next to the link, instead of the “StandardStats” link.
What’s RSS? | MamaBlogga Says:

March 25th, 2008 at 12:55 pm

[...] Pilgrim (and no, this one’s not by me, it’s by Jeremy Luebke) on why you should not use click tracking on FeedBurner (read on the comments to see how to fix [...]