Make the Move from FeedBurner to Google
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If you’re a blogger, you probably use FeedBurner to monitor your feed stats. It’s a great free service that gives you a lot of details about who’s subscribed to your feed and some tools to promote it.
Google bought over FeedBurner in the Summer of 2007, and are now moving all of the FeedBurner accounts into their Google accounts.
Why Should I Move?
In short, because you have to. Google just aren’t giving you an option here.
This is taken from their Feed Transfer FAQ page.
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.
Eventually, Google promises that you will get access to new feed tools and features through your Google Account, but for now the only advantage is that you can put AdSense into your feed and better stats about your email subscribers.
Update Sooner or Later?
Has your subscriber count dropped drastically in the past day or two? This could be the cause of it. Here’s another quote from the FAQ page:
However, the reporting and analytics may take up to a week to adjust to internet traffic changes, so the number of subscribers you see in analytics reports may be lower for a short period of time.
The sooner that’s over and done with, the better!
Making the Change
- 1 – Sign in to FeedBurner and click the “Move Your Account Now” link.
- 2 – Choose the Google Account you wish to use (Or make a new one!)
- 3 – Enter any extra details they ask for (May not be necessary if you’ve already done so. I had, so I’m not sure what they ask for, sorry!)
- 4 – All your feeds should be listed on the next page. Click “Move Feeds” to start the transfer.
- 5 – Wait. It took just over 5 minutes to move over my account with a year and half’s worth of data in it.
- 6 – If you used MyBrand (Using your own domain name for the feeds), then you need to go to http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand and follow the steps there.
- 7 – If you use a plugin to redirect your feed, make sure you update it to the new address (i.e. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/FeedName).
- 8 – Check all the links to the feed in your theme. If any of them are hard-coded into the design, make sure you change them too. Also, remember that the code for email subscriptions will change as well!
If you have any problems moving your feed over, Google’s recommendation is to post in the FeedBurner Help Group.
Have you moved your feeds over? Any trouble with the migration, or did it all go smoothly?
Update: Google have now set up a FeedBurner Status Blog which is reporting on issues with the service switchover. Worth checking before you attempt this!
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About the Author
Michael Martin
Michael Martin is the founder of Pro Blog Design. He works as a freelance web designer, loves WordPress, and has an unhealthy addiction to smilies.
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I have two Google accounts and they are all messed up now. The cookies aren’t working fine and I have to keep logging in (at times, it logouts automatically after 5 minutes of login).
By the way, mind elaborating on the “better stats about your email subscribers”?
Sure thing, this is from their FAQ page: :)
“The ability for publishers to distribute their feed via email has also been greatly enhanced. Email delivery now shares the same email delivery backend as other Google products, and you as the publisher can now search or page through your subscriber list to manage your email subscribers. ”
I haven’t tried it out myself though so I can’t comment much on it yet, sorry!
Two things:
I use MyBrand, and got 404 errors about half an hour after moving to google. I had to deactivate the MyBrand service, then reactivate it to get these errors to disappear.
Secondly, you forgot a part from the text about why stats are lower:
“In addition, the algorithms we use to calculate subscribers and reach at Google are more accurate and up to date than the algorithms previously used at FeedBurner.com, so your numbers will not be exactly the same before and after the transfer. We are constantly tuning our analytics to ensure they are accurate and correct for our publishers, but going forward we are only doing this within the Google environment.”
I saw that, but I’m having a bit of a hard time buying into that as the real reason. I can understand that they’ve improved the algorithms, sure, but why would it take them a week to apply the algorithm? And why couldn’t they use the old FeedBurner ones for that week even if the new ones did need it? :(
Had the same 404 issue. Deactivated and reactivated to solve. Thanks for the tip, Wesley!
@Wesley thanks for the tip re: the 404s and deactivating/reactivating MyBrand. It took me a while to work this out and it really should be in FeedBurner/Google’s instructions…
I wish I didnt do this change immediately. So many of the old feedburner features are missing as Google felt they were unnecessary. Also, it seems that suddenly my email subscribers is down to nil which is impossible unless everyone all of the sudden decided to pick the same day as my switch to Google to cancel their emails. Its annoying right now but I hope Google gets these glitches sorted sooner than later.
In theory, the stats should be back up after a week. But yeah, they’ve axed a few features that they considered the uptake of to be less than they’d hoped for. :(
So far so good… I did the big migration yesterday and, yes, as advertised, my stats are showing improbably low numbers today but they seem to indicate that this will get sorted in a week or so. My only concern, readng your post, is this business of updating feed links – as in, I haven’t done that yet. Do you happen to know if the old feedburner links will be supported &/or redirected for a time, to ease the transition, Michael — or should I really prioritize the find-and-fix on any hard-coded links?
From the “finished” page: “Your old FeedBurner feeds (at feeds.feedburner.com) will automatically redirect traffic to their new addresses on the feeds2.feedburner.com domain.”
So… there’s our answer!
As far as I’m aware, and from what Google say, you don’t need to update your current FeedBurner address. They’ll automatically redirect for as long as their service is in operation.
You know, Michael, having just done this yesterday, I’m surprised there isn’t more information floating around blogs. I considered publishing such a post myself, but you’ve sorted that.
Woops David, seems you’re right! Not sure how I missed that in the FAQ, but I suppose it makes sense. We’d lose all our subscribers otherwise. Makes me a little worried to know that my subscribers now have 2 different URLs for my feed. :(
It does seem a little un-talked about so far. I think the huge drop in subscriber numbers is throwing a lot of people off going near it :( (And prompting others! Depends on the person I suppose!)
My subscriber counts dropped before I learnt of the necessary change. In fact, if the numbers hadn’t gone down, I probably wouldn’t know about this requirement.
I’d like to know from Google why they bothered adding a new feed address. If the old ones simply redirect, what’s the point in adding an extra character to the code?
I don’t understand that either. When I first wrote this post, I had to go back and reword it from moving URLs to Google to just moving accounts to Google. I’d just assumed the URLs would change properly. Made a lot more sense than this!
And they want us to login at a google.com address, so we can use feeds at a feedburner.com address? That’s just going to get confusing! :(
rjleaman,
Christine and David are right. It’s probably not much of an issue to leave them the way they are, but for peace of mind as much as anything else I’d still do it whenever you get a minute. :)
Christine,
Thanks for helping out here, I missed that! Woops! xD
I moved my feeds, it took over an hour.
After i moved the feeds i needed to relogin to my Google account because the feed didn’t appear.
It went smooth for me. As for updating hardcoded links on your site, you don’t really have to, as Google/Feedburner redirects them automatically. However I changed all mine, just to be safe. Rather be safe, than trust some redirect.
Oh wow, I didn’t know it was REQUIRED to move or it all gets thrown away. I guess I should move it all over later today. :(
The migration was hassle free but having to edit the hard-coded links are a pain (especially when you have a couple of blogs) :P
,…and the drop in subscriber count is too painful for the eyes to see.
It really does hurt to see it! It better come back fully! :(
With a substantially lower than usual feed count, this is not the season to approach potential advertisers. LOL!
Just did mine the other day. Subscribers are down to about 600 from 1900, I hope they return soon.
Also, am I meant to link to feeds2.feedburner.com/feed or feedproxy.google.com/feed?
feeds2.feedburner.com/feed is the new address. I hope they return soon as well. I’m down to 0 today, so at least tomorrow can’t be any worse! :D
I don’t remember moving my account, but when I logged in and attempted to move my account following your instructions, I received this error message:
“The following feed URIs are already in use: Pelf-ismIsContagious.”
What does that mean, Micheal?
It seems to be working at both the addresses, http://feeds.feedburner.com/Pelf-ismIsContagious and the new http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Pelf-ismIsContagious
Are you still able to log in at http://feedburner.com, as well as http://feedburner.google.com? It sort of looks like they’ve copied your feeds over, but forgotten to close the old account. I searched in the help group, and a few people have had that problem. The only solution they were given was to email feedback@feedburner.com
That was an old reply though, so I don’t know if that address still works. Might be worth registering on the group and leaving a message as well? http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner
Michael,
Thanks for the tip in this comment thread. I hit a problem trying to move my Feedburner account over to the Google Account. Kept getting the error that pelf highlighted earlier:
“The following feed URIs are already in use:”
I then followed your tip, and checked http://feedburner.google.com. Turns out I did have a blog tied to that account as well. I just deleted the feed from http://feedburner.google.com, then tried moving the account again. Worked nicely!
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing what worked for you Praveen. If any more people get into that situation, I’ll advise them to try this out! :)
New url pointing to feedburner.google.com is using by another people …
http://feeds.feedburner.com/OLD-FEED <<– feedburner Account
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/OLD-FEED <<– Feedburner.Google, usually same name but taken by another people, why Google didn’t keep OLD-FEED name ????
Did mine yesterday without incident.
Haven’t noticed a lot of improvement apart from slightly prettier charts.
I don’t think there’s going to be many changes any time soon. Google haven’t done a lot with it since they took over, bar making the Pro stats free. But at least it went smoothly for you, I’m still missing a feed! :(
I spoke too soon when I said the transfer seemed to go fine:
Like you, Michael, I’m missing one feed. Oh, and still missing a few hundreds subscribers. But other than those small details…
I really don’t know what to do about the feed. There’s nothing more I can do about it from my end I think, and no-one is replying in the Support Group. If your problem is the same as mine, well, I wish I could help… :(
The subscriber count should come back to normal after about a week.
For MyBrand users, this document may be of help.
http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner/web/known-issues-workarounds?pli=1
For some reasons, you need to delete your existing MyBrand domain and then reenter it. It happened to me but doing this resolved the issue.
feeds2.feedburner.com is hopefully the final address. Users who still use feedproxy.google.com will be redirected there automatically.
Thanks a lot for this information. I didn’t realize that we had to do this manually and I would have let the service expire.
http://twitter.com/Colorburned
Welcome! It’s strange that they haven’t even sent out an email about this all. It’s rather important news, wouldn’t you think?? xD
The transfer went smooth, but the big issue is that at the new feedburner.google.com site it indicts on the FAQ page the other stats are available but I cannot find the check boxes as they describe. In their articles.
The big problem is when I log onto Feedburener Help group it seems that the only messages are from people with problems no solutions are coming forward.
I wonder why the Google tech team is not actively providing support with this transition?
Niels
I don’t understand that either. One of the messages is mine, but like you said, every time i log on, the only new messages I see are new support requests!
They’ve updated their Issues Page ( http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner/web/known-issues-workarounds ) yesterday, so it shows that they’re at least reading things I think. It is a little disappointing though, far too many people have had issues for them to just be silent! :(
I suppose that all we can do is sit about and wait…
I was trying to avoid thinking about this issue, but having seen my numbers go down and read your post, I thought I should give it a try. Thanks for explaining how easy it would be! Too early to say how it’s gone, but I was immediately struck by a panic thought about the FeedSmith plugin.
In case anyone else has the same worry, it looks as though FeedSmith transferred to FeedBurner, and from there to Google – I was a little surprised to click the plugin link and end up in Google Help – so I’m assuming that it will all still continue to work fine. It’s been a long long time since I installed the plugin, so everyone else may already know that.
Please let me know if you think I’m wrong here …
Hey Lucy,
The plugin has pointed to Google for quite a while now I think (Google bought over FeedBurner a year or two ago, so they bought ownership of the plugin as well), but yep, the plugin should still work. The only thing about it is that you should update the feed address you’ve pointed it to to your new http://feeds2.feedburner.com/feed one, instead of the old one :)
With that done, sounds like you’ll be all set! :D
Ah, a crucial step I’d have missed! Thanks …
Its done!
Thanks for you help and great article.
I moved mine yesterday, and it seemed to go okay. Like many my subscriber counts are way down. Hoping to see that back to normal quickly.
The whole things does seem a little disorganized with them not sending out an announcement email and with the weird new feed urls. It all feels kind of awkward.
Agreed, it’s been a bit chaotic! Google have been practically silent about the whole thing, which just makes it all the more un-nerving. Feels like we’re dealing with a (faulty!) system just, with no lifeline. :(
Thank you so much for this! I rarely signed in to my feedburner account, and had no idea that I had to manually transfer it! You saved me a lot of potential hassle!
I’m also very disappointed that I had to hear about this from social media…Google should have emailed me or contacted me directly in some way.
You made this process very easy for me. Thanks!
I transferred a couple of days ago. Two days before, my feed stats started showing about 80-90 subscribers instead of the 420+ it should have been showing. So I figured I’d make the switch while I was in the Feedburner page. My feedcounter (on my Advertise page of all places) is still broken, and I’m not sure whether it’s because of the switch or not, but either way I don’t like it.
I’m not sure what you can do to fix it tbh. Mine is broken as well it seems (N/A Subscribers? Pleh! xD ), but that’s happened before the odd time when FeedBurner chokes for a day or two. It’s always fixed itself in the past, so hopefully we’ll be up and running again soon! :)
You might want to update your plugin that shows your subscriber count.. Add that 1 number in there xD
Thanks for the heads up. Why didn’t I think of it? A number is better than just “N/A” .
Just made the switch and it seems like everything’s working. I use MyBrand and the hardest thing about that is knowing whether or not the cname entry in GoDaddy’s DNS management page is correct. The info google said I should use was rejected by Godaddy, so I made an educated guess and am keeping my fingers crossed.
Thanks for talking me through this. I’ve very un-techy, and things like this make me nervous. Your instructions were dead on and my change only took a couple of minutes (I just set up a new domain/site in November and have few subscribers).
I even managed to find the feeds in my plugin and sidebar so that everything goes smoothly.
Thanks for this walk-through guide, Michael. I had been hoping that someone would post something like this, and I have used it for reference while I did my own transfer, which was quick and (so far) painless.
Like David, I only discovered Google’s measures after my subscriber count fell by nearly half, and I did a search on twitter to see if anyone else was experiencing the same problem. After a couple of days my subscriber numbers recovered to their previous level of >900. Since doing the transfer a few minutes ago, they’ve fallen again but not as dramatically this time.
I opted to change over to the new feed link to avoid any potential pitfalls down the track from an automatic redirect that I have no control over.
Thank you for this! The walk through helped so much. I would have been freaking out the entire time otherwise wondering if I was doing everything right. Things seemed to go well… though I am still missing about 50% of my subscriber count – arrgh!
Today, i got some errors in my feed count and when i checked my feed address, it was changed from feedproxy.google to feeds2.feedburner.com
Don’t know why this happened
Very non-techy question here. I’ve been having FB issues since early December when my numbers dropped to 1/3 of what they were. The feed is moved over to Google. The “old” feed is still showing numbers (albeit low) and Google shows zero. According to Michael:
“The only thing about it is that you should update the feed address you’ve pointed it to to your new http://feeds2.feedburner.com/feed one, instead of the old one.”
Here’s my non-techy question. Are you talking about “pointing” somewhere in my rss feed on the site or in Feedburner itself? If FB, then on the old or new google one?
It’s already showing up this way on the google feedburner with http://feeds2.feedburner.com/wanderlustandlipstick. But I’m thinking I need to make the tweak on the site where people actually sign up.
Thanks!
Hey Michael, just curious if you know of any issue with posts repeating in feeds 5 times in a row?
I posted about this (and my drop in Google Feedfetcher subs) in the Google Feedburner help group on the 22nd but still no response. I see that my posts started repeating in my feed on Jan 16, the same day that my Google Feedfetcher numbers dropped from 263 to 80.
I hadn’t moved my feeds to Google yet (did that on Wed. Jan 21). Moving to Google didn’t solve the issue but I’m going to bet that this is all related.
Wondering if anyone else has had this issue and if so how you fixed it. Thanks very much. :)
JoLynn
When I log in to Feedburner, I have no link to migrate to Google? Any ideas why? Is this a stepped approach, where the link will be added sometime in the next few weeks?
It looks like it worked out quite well (so far). I was wondering why my subscriber numbers fell, but I have an idea now. Thank you for the heads up!
I moved my blog and my wife’s blog over to the Google. It went fairly well, but after a week, I still won’t display the number of subscribers on my blog. Somehow 0 readers doesn’t look as good as 773 readers at the top of my sidebar! Will the number ever become what it is actually supposed to be?
just another reason why i should use other email marketing.
i wonder what happen when twitter really become another
google tools. sigh, don’t want that to happen actually.
Done. That was ‘nerve-racking’. Thanks for the quick & easy guide … that you’d think Google would have the resources to provide. :)
I hesitated the other day when I saw the (very small) link about the switch. Just did it now and it was very painless. We’ll see if it affects anything unforeseen
Wow! It’s been almost two weeks since I moved my blog over to Google’s FeedBurner, and my feed count plugin still pulls in that I have 0 subscribers. Is there a way to contact Google/FeedBurner? The feeds are working fine – probably better than they did before the transfer, except for this issue.
Hey Rob,
The plugin itself is the problem. I’m not using it anymore. Are you using PHP4 or 5 on your blog? There are ways to get the plain text version, but if you’re on PHP4 like me, it’s a little more complicated. :(
Sorry, after I just posted, I saw that you had already replied. I’m sorry, but I don’t even know how to tell if I’m using php 4 or 5. I’m using WP 2.7. What’s in that? (I’m fairly low tech, as you can see.)
Michael, someone posted on the plugin in site what you need to do to make the old plugin work with Google’s FeedBurner.
In the feedcount.php plugin file find:
api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri
Replace that with:
https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=
I did it, and it works fine for me now.
That line you’re replacing should read http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri
(The edit function in your comments isn’t working, Michael. Even though I still had over 3 minutes to edit, according to the countdown, when I clicked on it, it wouldn’t respond. Hence, a second new reply to my reply)
I’m still having a non-updating issue even after I’ve changed the api. Did it work almost immediately in your case, Rob?
Michael, you told me in the past about the WordPress plugin called Feed Count that allows you to display the number of subscribers without the ugly little FeedBurner chicklet. The count shown through Feed Count is the one that has remained at 0, but I just tried the chicklet and it reads 777. Did you have to do something to get your Feed Count plugin to start displaying the right number after the transfer? I’ve tried deactivating it and reactivating it, but alas, it shows either 0 or N/A. I’ve also tried deactivating and reactivating Awareness API in FeedBurner, to no avail. I guess I can live with the chicklet, but it would be nice to go back to plain text like you have and like I had. :-)
For anyone still having trouble with their feeds, Google have set up a Feed Burner status blog. At the very least, if your problem isn’t solved, you can at least see if they’re working on it!
http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/
hello dear friends!!
I have read the topic here and posts as far as I could, and I have some questions, just for making a bit clearer, hopefully for many readers as well…
I’ll try to describe my problem, I hope I’m not the only one to have it, so it would be a point to discussion as well… :/
the facts:
a) I transferred my feeds from Feedburner -> Google.
b) Have already passed the 72 hours, the subscribers seem to be back again, as before the migration
c) Feeds seem to be ok…
– but – (unfortunately there’s always a ‘but’)
a) I have registered my feeds to several services, who re-publish content as a news syndicator (let’s say sth similar to google news, which displays rss news from several sources). I noticed that in some sites the content from my website is not anymore updated. Same problem noticed on Technoratti’s page, the feed has ‘stuck’ on posts just 3-4 days ago, *before* the migration happened
b) I have been monitoring my posts from my site, and have seen a great push on by posts in Google results. That means that even 5 min after a post, there was an immediate appearance in google results with the headline of that specific post… This was just a small part (maybe) of a seo strategy which seemed to be effective (our site has also a good pagerank). Well, after the migration, I haven’t seen a similar behavior! This made me very anxious.. Even sites that made links to a specific article on our site, seemed to be first or just *appearing* in google results, and not our original article’s link!
I have to mention that no other change has been made to the code or content of our site, and it is checked as clear, with no any ‘flag’ which could result us as a ‘blocked’ site, or sth else similar… :( :(
I have also changed just some min ago the attribute to the HEAD of our pages to feed2.feedburner.com and on links into the page where direct to feed2… I still keep an eye on possible changes or other things, which I’ll be happy to share them here..
Did I helped you understand my issue? I would be very happy to have any comments!
{ P.S: Sorry for my poor English… }
there is no longer a “move your feed now” link on the signed in Feedburner home (???)
That may be because you have already moved your feedburner account to googlr account.
:)
>>> That may be because you have already moved your feedburner account to google account.
<<< thx… maybe… but if I go to http://feedburner.google.com I have no feeds. odd and disconcerting. I have my WP feeds redirected to FB and they are aggregated “all over the place”. Dont want things turning ugly!
moving feeds temporarily suspended according to http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/
I have the same problem, i can’t find that option in my feedburner home page, where am i supposed to find that thing?
Looks like if you:
1) log into feedburner account
2) log into the google account you want to transfer to
3) then click on the following link you can still make the transfer.
https://feedburner.google.com/migration/start.action?hl=en
Since google isn’t doing a good job about notifying people what’s going on I didn’t want to wait around til the last minute.
I really think google is messing this transition up (no e-mail notice? seriously?)
Finally got it to work…for a while there were no options to ‘move’ but its done now!
ditto – THANKS Caleb! :) was fubar b4 but just moved my feeds in a few clicks – EZ! :)
I moved my feed to Google about a month ago because Feedburner prompted me to do so…
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/cincinnatusblog
is still functioning…
But I have not yet found a way to access the stats in relation to this feed. Where are these supposed readership statistics located within my Google account? Is it directly attached to my Analytics account or is there a separate function for the latter?
Would love some help
thanks
Hello, could anybody out there please advise on Feedburner problem which has been driving me crazy for over a week now.
We have a WordPress blog at http://www.flomotionradio.com, which we’ve updated several times recently.
The blog updates fine, but the Feedburner feed we’re using to distribute our RSS feed, podcast episodes and email updates isn’t updating.
The feed address is now http://feeds2.feedburner.com/FlomotionRadio (previously, it was http://feeds.feedburner.com/FlomotionRadio).
Any ideas how I might be able to solve this problem would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks,
Lars
thank you,
now i follow this post and transfer my feeds
Any advice on how to move my feeds now? I didn’t realize that I had to move my account and now it seems to be stuck in limbo! Any help would be greatly appreciated.
A whole-hearted thank you for the wake-up call.
I am searching alot for this thanks buddy.
This is truly a great read for me. I have bookmarked it and I am looking forward to reading new articles. Keep up the good work.
I am searching alot for this thanks buddy.
Hi there, just become alert to your blog through Google, and found that it’s truly informative. I’m gonna watch out for brussels. I will appreciate if you continue this in future. A lot of other folks will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!
Hey Brian Just saw your Tweet,I would be nervous to,Not sure what Google has pnanled for the future as a big picture. You just hear so many things. If Google were to exclude as many things as we have read about in the last year they would be closed up. We know that is going to happen.I’m sure all your data will be intact I just don’t see them overlooking anything in that respect.If you look at most decisions that have ever been made, especially now, they are money driven. Who always wins at that gameThe only way to combat the situation to any extent is strength in numbers. Most people won’t listen to that until its to late.Such is lifeAll will be OKBrad West ~ onomoney