Control Your Own Feed : 301 Permanent Redirects

Do you publish your feed by feedburner. Problogger raises an issue that why publish to the world an RSS feed URL that we don’t own?

What if you switched services? Will your readers bother to update their feed?

Problogger says

“So what can we do about it? Using a URL from your blog’s domain then having your webserver serve up a 301 “permanent redirect” that redirects to whatever your feeds.feedburner.com/[your-feed-here] URL could be a good option, except for the fact that some news readers choke on the redirect (such as NetNewsWire).”

“Why did I specifically recommend a 301 redirect, not a plain 302 redirect? Because a 301 — unlike the usual 302 temporary redirect that most everyone uses — lets the search engines like Google know that the redirect is pointing to a stable destination, and therefore the link juice (e.g. Google PageRank) should flow to the destination URL.”

To know about more technical details of how to set it up and change it, read their post.

Blogger publishes a default atom feed, but I have set the feedburner feed as default because it has several great features to offer and it works just fine. Now Problogger gets me thinking!