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Is Feedburner Siphoning Your Link Juice?

posted on April 24, 2007


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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  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    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.

  • http://www.xuru.com Jeremy Luebke

    At least MP wasn’t the only one :D

  • http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/ Matt McGee

    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!

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  • http://www.bushidoblog.com.ar Dario

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

  • http://www.daviddalka.com/createvalue/ David Dalka

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

  • Jordan McCollum

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

  • http://www.alibiproductions.com Drew Stauffer

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

  • http://www.joostdevalk.nl/blog/ Joost de Valk

    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.

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  • http://www.jasonblogs.com/ Jason Schramm

    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.

  • http://christopherhedges.com Chris

    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.

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