How to configure Feedburner so that it does not affect your SEO?

We all know about Google Feedburner. On June 3, 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google Inc., for a rumored price of $100 million according to Wikipedia. In one word, Feedburner helps to manage the WordPress generated feed to more efficient version (version, as the url changes totally) as well as manage the subscribers.

Previously. Feedburner had some paid services (like MyBrand and TotalStats), they are no more paid now after acquisition by Google Inc. Feedburner has a bunch of features like traffic analysis, Advertisement management, e-mail subscription system that works as good as paid e-mail subscription service; more over you can add Twitter, Digg, Facebook like etc. link in Feedburner™s feed.

However, Feedburner does has some problem, if the default settings are used. Among them (which quite peculiar as Google owns both now) most problematic is Feedburner feed get indexed by Google and shows up as duplicate content in Google Webmaster Tool.

In this article, we will discuss on how to optimize your Feedburner feed to avoid these issues plus we will tell about about some WordPress plugins. As a matter of fact, we need to use Google Feedburner with fantastic features, but we can not allow it to kill the SEO strategy of our website.

Do not allow your Feedburner feed to be indexed by Google

There are three methods to prevent the feed of content to be indexed by Google search engine and other search engines.

The first is obvious; do not put any textual link in the sidebar to Feedburner. This is a bad and impractical idea for some bloggers. Image link will have less strength than textual link.

You can request the search engines not to index your feedburner feed by adding a nofollow link. Unfortunately, nofollow is always respected. You can check the option : Indicate that your feed should not be indexed by search engines under Publicize tab in your Feedburner configuration panel.

Third measure is radical and most effective. Simply disallow the feed to be crawled by search engines by disallowing it.

Post excerpts instead of full article in your feed

It is important that if you show more article links with small summary, people will be more interested to read your Feedburner feed.

You can easily set the summary to be shown, instead of full article just from your WordPress settings. Go to Reading settings and select œSummery for the option saying œFor each article in a feed, show.

You need not to do anything in Google Feedburner configuration panel.

Remove the redirection of Feedburner

By default, Feedburner overrides the url of your domain. This allows it to capture the subscriber statistics of your feed, i.e. the number of people who read an article, when downloaded a link or which system of Feed reader the user is using. You can determine whether the subscribers are bot or real (to some extent) from the last information.

If you uncheck “Item link clicks” from “Configure Stats” in Feedburner, this problem will be resolved; however you will unable to track the links of your feed.

Some bonus advices

You can create a subdomain for feeds; it will look like feeds.yourdomain and manage the feeds there with some other tools. You might have noticed, big websites, blogs, forums distributes feed in this way.

The plugin RSS footer for WordPress This plugin makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feeds, for instance to display a link back. You can understand how efficiently you can manage your Feedburner feed.

If you use the plugin ” Yet another related posts plugin “, which displays items similar posts within your already posted articles, you can also include a list of items in your feeds. This will also encourage your readers to visit your site.

Next important advice is; to add Twitter follow, Facebook like, Digg etc link at the end of your Feedburner feed. Go to Optimize tab in Feedburner configuration panel and click FeedFlare. Add the services you want.

Do you use Feedburner Feedsmith plugin for WordPress? We guess you are already using the indispensable tool.

And for that matter, we invite you to subscribe to our RSS feed if you have not already done!