Feedburner to Google: Earlier You Move, The Less You Will Lose
Are you a blogger? If you are then you must be using feedburner to track your subscriber count. This free service is great, and it was bought by google in Summer 2007. But now Google has started to implicit their own rules. You are mandatory to move from Feedburner Account to your Google Account.
You Don’t Have A Choice!!!
That’s right. I read the FAQ page and found:
We are currently planning to have all accounts transferred by February 28, 2009. At that time if your account has not been updated, you will no longer be able to access your account at http://www.feedburner.com, and your feeds will either begin returning a “404 Not Found” response or a “301 Moved” response back to your source feed.
Why the heck is Google doing this?
Personally I think they are retarded for doing this because it takes up my time because of all the things that I had to change. Well the real reason for them doing this is they have more things planned. Eventually, you will be getting more features with Feedburner, and you will be able to put your adsense in your feeds. All to all the stats will be more accurate! (Seriously Google, it wasn’t accurate before?) Ah well just follow along.
Process of Moving
Pretty darn simple as google would like to call it. Well you login to your feedburner account. You will see a move link toward the top. Click on it. Choose the feeds you want to move. I am hoping you will move all of them unless you don’t care about one of your feeds. Give it 5 minutes, and it is all done. Hah thats when google’s part is done. Ofcourse their part was easy. Your part will be a living hell. Your Feedburner url is now changed.
So from http://feeds.feedburner.com/balkhis the url has now become http://feeds2.feedburner.com/balkhis
Next thing is that the email code is changed. And by default it was disabled for my feed. I enabled it right away. Then put the new code in my website.
So make sure you make the template changes, and change all your prior posts which have the link to your feeds.
Earlier You Move, The Less You Will Lose
You are probably wondering why I put that in title. Well it is true. Due to the transfer, you will lose a good number of your subscribers for a few days. Well at least google won’t record it. So my subscriber count from 1900s it went down to almost 1340s which pissed me off. But I made the change last week. Now it has gotten back up to the normal amount. So the sooner you are over with, the better it is. You don’t want to start a new month, with your subscriber going down. Better to do it while the month is about to end.
Next thing was that I had to make template changes. Which wasn’t a big deal because you change one file thats all. But to change all posts that I have embedded my email box. That was a Pain in the ***. I think google should’ve kept the feedburner way and add the new way on top. To make our life a bit easier, but they are not very considerate. Any ways nothing in life is free. You have to pay some what a price. And this is the price you pay for feedburner.
I hope you guys move, and hopefully you can do it safely. If you get stuck, feel free to comment below, and I will try to assist you.
Hey, I am Syed Balkhi, The guy who is behind Balkhis Inc. I entered the industry back in 2002 not knowing a single thing. I barely spoke English at that time. In the past six years, my language barrier has been eliminated. Aside from English, now I also speak html, and php. Along with the languages I have also managed to master a few arts. Art of web-designing started when I first entered. Messing around with photoshop, I learned how to create my first web design. Now I founded a web designing firm Uzzz Productions. After running numerous amount of websites in various niche, I have mastered the art of web-development. Now I am compiling a resource of what I already know, and what I am learning on this blog. This resource is to help me if I ever need a guide to look back to, and it is help my fellow webmasters.
Yeah, I saw the notification on my feedburner, thanks to your post O_o
Hope it’s really worth it to move everything to Google
Thank you. My problem is likely to be smaller than yours, but getting on with it makes sense.
Hi!
Thanks for your post! I have moved my feeds already thanks to you.
Knowing Google. It’s going to be something they can Big Brother over while still giving us enough rope to do our own thing.
Thanks for the offer to help.
All the Best!
Regards,
Erwin Chua
http://winning2win.com
[...] to fellow blogger Syed Balkhi, I was able to be informed early and easily move my feed content to Google without a [...]
A small correction: You missed an ‘s’ in the URLs above. It’s feeds.feedburner.com/balkhis and feeds2.feedburner.com/balkhis respectively!
Also it’s a good idea to change the feedsmith settings as well as wherever you would have hardcoded the subscribe to feeds links on any pages as well as your online accounts (socila media, forum signatures, RSS directories…)
I’ve noticed it last month when I want to add my feed to luvComment,
luckily I only need to change some of the feed url and it works very well… but it’s good for you to notify everyone.
Damnit, this is going to be a major pain in the ass for myself and anyone using my feeds. Not only do I need to update my sites, but I have to inform people that use the feeds as well?!?!? WTF Google?!?!
Good golly gosh! What a pain! Thanks for the head’s up! Even after reading your post, I almost didn’t see the “we’re moving” blurb on Feedburner’s page. Oddly, Feedburner said I had no susbscribers! Google showed that I had them still (all 6 of them!). Do we have to change the address with places like Twitter and Facebook????
Yeah if you are publishing your feeds than you do.
where do I get the new code? I am lost
Umm you login to feedburner.com move your account. Then go to feedburner.google.com and then go to the email section and get the new code.
I choose to move to google account and there is something wrong. Maybe is because I signed up the feedburner is this yahoo and google account I used for blogspot is hotmail email. Now I need to wait email from them. Since it is move to google account my feed is EMPTY. I have more than 10 subscriber on two blogs.
As long as there are no moving costs or any other additional costs then I don’t see a problem with moving.
I am already done!
hey nice post,
thank God now i can see the exact stats.
i followed it right away, and transferred my feeds from feedburner to google. and i feel really satisfied now. cuz it’s the most crucial stage for my Blog, my followers and subscribers have just began to grow everyday i cud not have afforded to loose them.
Outstanding information, I was not on par with this, but now thank goodness I am, I will be making the appropriate changes asap.
Glad you got here on time Ben
[...] feed at the end of the month with no way to repair the damage that will be done. Head of to Balkis.com and read about how to transition from the original soon to be non functioning feedburner site to [...]
Such things happen.But I can not see great tragedy in it.Take it easy and everything willbe all right.
Funny, after I moved my account, I didn’t notice any weird fluctuation on my subscriber count. Maybe because it was around 200 only?
This looks like another great way for Google to start monetizing feeds. Thanks for sharing this info, Im sure it will save a lot of people who did not know about this.
I’ve already transferred the feeds but I still need to change links. It’s so boring…
[...] Feedburner to Google – The earlier you move, the less you will lose [...]
Thanks very much… this is now on my ToDo list
Thanks for reminding us
and thanks for explanation. I thought it was difficult process, but it was an easy, and will save us a lot of pain when Feb ends.
Yeah I moved and this is much much much more stable than before. I witnessed an increase in my no. of subscribers as well..
Ben
When i was signed into my google account, it automatically signed me into feedburner using google, then i knew something was amiss, shifted to google.feedburner
Due to your post and recommendations I have got some more experience with feedburner.google.com.My account is OK now.
I already had taken care of this as soon as I could
Glad I did too, was a pain changing all the links.
Ugh – I made the change over. It was a slight pain but I think google made it as easy as they could.