Should You Integrate Feedburner and Aweber?

bill — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:05:23 +0000

A little while ago, Aweber announced their integration with Feedburner, which was quickly reported by problogger.net. Somehow, easywordpress knew about it even before aweber released it.

Although this is a very cool change for Aweber, I don’t usually use Feedburner. This is because the rss feed it generates has all the links to posts as redirects. So if you show the Feedburner RSS button, any spiders that usually crawl and scrape the posts will send the link juice to the Feedburner redirect and not my site. Plus, displaying a Feedburner image showing “0 readers” for any length of time isn’t very encouraging.

On a new site every inbound link counts and getting them from a variety of sources as deep links directly to the post helps a lot. RSS feeds being syndicated with inbound links pointing directly to post pages is also extremely helpful.

When a site already is established and has a ton of inbound links and trust I’m sure these harmful effects are minor.

So before I could get excited about integrating aweber with FeedBurner, I needed to figure out how to solve this problem.

My solution was to show everyone a Feedburner image which takes them to my rss feed at “/rss”, but when they click the link, my javascript fires and switches the link to the actual FeedBurner feed. You can see this on one of my newer sites:

This results in users going to Feedburner, but robots, with their inability to follow javascript, follow the original “/rss” path. Since we want to get our content and posts crawled and indexed by other sites linking back to us instead of FeedBurner, this is perfect.

The other benefit, and the point of this post, is that now we can use FeedBurner right off the bat, and it will count all our aweber subscriptions along with our RSS readers. That is why the image above shows 75k readers (Heck, only a handful of blogs have that many RSS readers!)

I am currently rolling this functionality into a plugin that will additionally give you an aweber subscription box, along with help in getting the two services linked properly. I am pretty excited about it and hope to have it released in the next week or so. If you want be notified of updates and instructional help videos that go along with this plugin be sure to subscribe to my site using the subscription box on the top right of BillMcintosh.com.

Bill McIntosh » feedburner

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Should You Integrate Feedburner and Aweber?

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