Feedburner uses wrong HTTP-Status for Feed-Items?
Published 2005-10-28, 19:46
I just did a small blog-ego-search on German search engine Seekport: http://seekport.de/q?query=betamode
On place 5 of the results I found a link to Nicole Simon’s weblog Ideengeberin.de, or to be precise: the post Skypalbay where I left a trackback. But in Seekport the link isn’t listet with the correct permalink http://ideengeberin.de/blog/artikel-129.html but http://feeds.feedburner.com/ideengeberin?m=33.
At first I thought Seekport also suffers the 301 redirection bug that Google once did, replacing the real URLs with redirects pointing to is. But no, it’s not Seekport – Feedburner is redirecting the users using a status 302 moved temporarily:
GET /ideengeberin?m=33 HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*
Referer: http://seekport.de/q?query=betamode
Accept-Language: de
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; i-NavFourF; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Host: feeds.feedburner.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 17:39:45 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://ideengeberin.de/blog/artikel-129.html
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/plain
I think that’s wrong. The item is not only temporarily available under the URL http://ideengeberin.de/blog/artikel-129.html, it will stay there permanently. So Feedburner should use a „301 Moved Permanently“ to not harm its users in search engines.
Agree?
( 1 )
Mailed this posting to Feedburner half an hour ago, just got a reply from Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo. Wow, that’s fast.
He says „the 302 is entirely intentional and there are a number of reasons for this.“ I’ll get a second message with an explanation.
Hope I didn’t disgrace myself 🙂
Comment von Jan am 28. Oktober 2005
( 2 )
How did you go about finding the 302 redirect?
Comment von gsyi am 28. Oktober 2005
( 3 )
I still use Internet Explorer most the time (shame on me!) and so I used ieHTTPHeaders to monitor the headers sent.
But you could also use a local proxy (Proxomitron) or, if you’re using Firefox, one of the many developer extensions.
Comment von Jan am 29. Oktober 2005
( 4 )
At the moment I´m using the firefox extension web developer, but unfortunately I can´t look up the http headers infomation with it…
Comment von gsyi am 29. Oktober 2005
( 5 )
Oh yeah, I´ve just found the feature, it´s unter „information“ 🙂
Comment von gsyi am 29. Oktober 2005
( 6 )
Yes, it is the feature for counting the clickthrough, which means, that search engines who feed from the rss feed and links will keep the ‚wrong‘ address.
thanks for the reminder, I wanted to turn that thing off a long time ago, because I never use it. 🙂
Comment von Nicole Simon am 31. Oktober 2005
( 7 )
Oh, so Feedburner also has the option to use a 301 Moved permanently redirect if you dont want to count the clickthroughs?
Comment von Jan am 31. Oktober 2005