Feed Me! Moving Your RSS Feed
Have you ever thought about moving your blog? For many of us as our blogs grow, we think about moving to a different URL or to a self hosted site (like using wordpress.org which allows you to use the wonderful framework and blog designs of wordpress while having your own personalized domain) if we are not already self-hosting. But if your blog has been housed at one location for a while, how do you move it without losing your feed subscribers? This is a question a lot of people don’t ask until they are faced with the issue. So if you are asking this question then you have likely moved your blog and discovered that your subscribers are no longer getting their RSS feed.
I have moved blogs before and I spent a lot of time looking into the best way to redirect the URL. I was concerned that people who knew my web address would have difficulty finding the site. Plus I did not want any outside links to unlink because I moved my blog. Eventually I chose to do a 301 redirect. What this does is when you go to the old URL it takes you to my new site automatically. Using the 301 redirect I don’t lose the SEO work I have done, page ranking I have gained in search engines and people would still be able to easily find my blog. However, that 301 did not seem to work on my RSS. Now that is strange.
The research that I did indicated that it would. However, though some feedback from subscribers I found this not to be the case. That is because I was using feedburner to manage my RSS. Apparently the 301 redirect does not affect the feedburner feed because that feed is through an outside source and you cannot redirect a feed that is not your own, though if you are not using an RSS manager the 301 will work perfectly well.
Thankfully, there was an easy fix. I grabbed the feed URL for my new domain name and replaced my old feed URL with the new one. This then solved the issue of my existing subscribers missing out on my feed. Now my new website is feeding to the new feedburner RSS and the old one. So new subscribers and existing subscribers alike will be able to read the feed.
Your domain name is an important part of your branding, but taking care of your existing audience is also important. You want to make sure if you do a domain change that you are not losing the audience you have built up!