As you probably know, Google acquired Feedburner in 2007. Then a couple of months ago they announced that they would start migrating the feeds hosted on Feedburner to Google’s servers.
Initially, the transition was optional, and mostly the publishers interested in using the new services like AdSense for feeds migrated.
Lately, however, Feedburner started presenting many glitches and bugs (one of them is related to the feed count numbers), propelling many bloggers to make the transition.
To complicate things, Google also announced that they expect to get all the feeds transferred by February 28, and they mentioned that after that day Feedburner feeds will start reporting a 404!
I am not sure what will happen on February 28, but I am sure that next week you will see a horde of desperate bloggers trying to make the transition all at the same time. I wouldn’t want to be among them, honestly.
In fact yesterday I transferred my feeds. You just need to log into your Feedburner account, and click on the link that you see at the top saying “Move my feed to Google” (or something like that, I forgot the text…).
After that follow the 3 steps and you should be done. Depending on the size of your RSS feeds, it might take a while though. It took around 5 hours to complete the transition of mine. The good thing is that you can close your browser window and keep working normally while Google’s servers do the work.
It looks like my feeds are working normally, but if you find any bug please let me know. The feed count should take around one week to start reporting the correct numbers again.
When do you plan to transfer yours? If you have already transferred, are they working normally?
Update: The deadline is not next Wednesday as I had mentioned before, but next month. Guess I am working too hard these days….
I have 2 Google accounts. Le’s say I have Acc1 which is the account with which I manage AdSense and a generic Acc2. I moved the feeds to Acc2, but doing this I can’t use AdSense for feeds! I need to move the feeds from Acc2 to Acc1, any idea on how can I do this?
Thanks for the great info. I switched mine a few days ago. But did not realize that I had to reinstall my subscribe icon on my blog. Reading your article made me go back and double check it. Thanks Again!!
Just moved mine a month ago… I see no difference in the service though.
Thank you Daniel!
I am a subscriber to you and your blog, and look forward to your insights…
I also follow you on Twitter…
Keep up the good work!
@Kari, wait 1 week or so. This should solve the problem.
Thank you for the information! I just transferred mine over. I don’t have many subscribers yet since I just started, but I appreciate getting this heads up.
Thanks for a great blog!
Did the transfer a couple weeks ago, subscriber numbers were off for about a week, now they look fine.
The only problem is that I don’t have stats. I can see the “Configure Stats” link, but no stats. Is anyone else having the same problem? Is there a way to fix it, or just sit and wait?
I completed the transfer.
All I have to say is… Where did all my subscribers go? 🙂
Some days ago the link showed up on my login site, up to then I even didn’t know there was a change due.
Transfer went without problems, although I seemingly lost some subscribers. If I remember correctly, the Feedburner Staff mentioned something about improved algorithms to count subscribers. Perhaps this is the reason for the losses.
@Nick and TalkTurkey, I’d say that the normal links will still work, since Feedburner forwards them to Google. But I think you will need to update the EMail-Subscription-Link.
I just found out two days ago when I logged into Feedburner. And then I checked my blog the next day and was greeted to a chiclet that show 0 subscribers. I had the Feedsmith plugin and the feed url changed. That was an easy enough fix. Except now I show 170 subscribers when I had 350 before the change. But I am not alone:
I had NO idea I had to do this!
Thanks for the tip!
Feb 28th would have come around and I would have been in big trouble.
Boy, I was wondering why the feedburner/google tranfer was getting so much coverage from a ton of sites. I think this is the 5th one I have read on the subject, but the first to say why you should transfer and what happens if you don’t. All the others I read just said stuff like “I just transfered mine, here is how you do it…”
I didn’t realize it was going to be a manditory type of thing, I thought – great you use google feeds instead.
I just signed up for mine so I may as well go out and try to do it while I still remember the password.
This is why I left FeedBurner about a year ago — I feared this would happen, which is ironic, because that was the exact reason I signed up for FeedBurner in the first place..
Originally, my blog was on a free subdomain from No-IP.com (as I hosted my site at home on a dynamic IP address), and I feared that if I one day lost the subdomain, I would lose all my readers in one fell swoop.
Of course, when I bought my own domain, I felt differently. I trusted my own infrastructure far more than I trusted FeedBurner’s. So one day, I decided to bite the bullet, and move to my own blog’s feed URL and do my own stats implementation.
In light of these new events, I’m glad I did it.
Thanks for the heads up. I just switched mine. No far, no problems! The feed count is the same as it was before I switched. I’ll just have to wait & see if I get the email subscription tonight for the post I made today.
already did. AS soon as google started its transition I did the same. I follow what google says. Google is awesome, biased I know, but hey google is goolgle. 😉
I switched mine yesterday too. And yes, you may be working too hard. 🙂
@TalkTurkey, wait 1 week.
@David, I will keep them like that for now. Then in 10-15 days I will update the links.
@Shaun, yes and no. Yes it would be good to be safe. No because Google should keep a redirect in place, else I am don’t know how your old subscribers would keep getting your posts.
Daniel, you are very important to me. Thanks for all your timely advice. I’m switching from Feedburner to Google as we “speak”!
Hey,
Do I have to change my feedburner subscriber boxes? Or my feedburner URLs?
What on-site changes need to be made?
Thanks!
For now, feedburner forms on your site are automatically being transferred over to google, but you will need to updated them.
I transferred all 3 of my blogs back in December. So far, I haven’t seen any problems with it, and I’ve been able to add Adsense to my feeds, which makes me happy!
I have the same question as Nick (#31)…
???
I switched over to Google last week when I logged into feedburner and saw the notice that they were making the change. It was painless and I haven’t identified any problems with the feed since I’ve changed it.
I just started my blog about a month ago, so I’m not too concerned about the stats just yet. I guess I should take a look and see if mine are working.
Thanks for the reminder on this , there are some many thing to follow up on a daily basis. I would midded this.
Well… Daniel, I have already do this before. I have transfered from feedburner to google.. You can take a look at my site http://hol-service.com 🙂
I just starting moving mine, though mine wont take 5 hours since only one person is subscribing!
One question though? What about the feed burner stuff on your website, like how you can type in your email and it subscribes you, that wont work anymore right? Unless we just have to change the addresses of where it points. I have no idea.
Great post, once I read this I switched mine over to google right of the bat.
Hi Daniel,
It took 50 minutes to transfer my two feeds, though I’ve yet to change the actual feed address to include the ‘2’ (feeds2.feedburner.com/).
Will you be updating your code, or leaving it as it is, and using the automatic redirect?
I’ve been keeping an eye on some of the larger blogs, hovering my cursor over their RSS icon to see if they’ve changed the address. Most haven’t, and I think I’ll keep the old one (at least for now).
Interested in what you’ll be doing.
I hadn’t even noticed that link in FeedBurner until you mentioned it. Thanks for the heads up. I made the transfer for my feeds and the feeds of a non-profit a volunteer for. Each went without incident so far as I can tell. Thanks again!
Transferred three days ago; all went smoothly, though the numbers are of by 10%-15% at the moment. Not sure if that’s because Feedburner had a too high number to begin with or that it’s still first week glitches.