Update the Feed Links on Your Header Section

Today’s video post is about making sure that the feed links on your header section are also pointing to your Feedburner feed.

Here is a quick summary:

This is a common mistake among bloggers that use Feedburner
Basically they update the RSS icons or links on the body of the website, but forget the header section, which is used by the autodiscovery feature on most browsers
The problem comes from the fact that people will end up subscribing to different feeds, your subscriber stats might become incorrect and so on
You can solve this on WordPress by editing the header.php file
First of all remove the last 2 of the 3 “alternate” links that you will find there. Then simply update the URL of the first one, removing the WordPress PHP code and inserting your Feedburner URL instead.

If you can’t see the video player here is a link to you YouTube page.

Daniel Scocco on July 14, 2008 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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25 Responses to “Update the Feed Links on Your Header Section”

SEO Genius on July 14th, 2008 12:57 pm

Thanks for the video post Daniel, can this happen only to wordpress themes, or can it happen to any website using any design?
JACKIE JACKSON on July 14th, 2008 1:03 pm

This is a real nice and important post, I encountered this problem in my early days of blogging and it took me days to figure out the fix. Great job (as usual) and I request more of such technical videos in the future. Tips like these really help maintain blogs.
Daniel Scocco on July 14th, 2008 1:12 pm

@SEO Genius, it can happen to any website that published an RSS feed and is using Feedburner or some other service where he desires all the subscribers to go.
Rich on July 14th, 2008 2:05 pm

So does this make the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin redundant? I searched online, but haven’t found anything that really tells me what the plugin does — other than change the RSS2 address…
David Airey on July 14th, 2008 2:26 pm

Good question, Rich.

I’ve been using that plugin for ages, so my address bar icon was already redirecting to FeedBurner.

This is still useful though, as it eliminates some PHP action.

Cheers Daniel.
Brooke on July 14th, 2008 2:42 pm

This was great! I changed my header right away - I had never thought of that before! Thank you.
JK Swopes on July 14th, 2008 3:41 pm

@Daniel, is this still required if you use the wordpress feedburner plugin? I think it’s called feedsmith, and it’s said that it redirects all your feeds to the feedburner feed.

Do you know if this will remedy the header link issue?
Sarah Jo on July 14th, 2008 3:58 pm

Thanks for the heads up! I made the changes immediately. Only took five minutes!
Daniel Scocco on July 14th, 2008 4:20 pm

@Rich and David,

The plugin has some uses besides that one. Someone could type /rss/ into your URL and he would be able to get yet another feed source, if you didnt have the plugin in place.

Overall we are talking about really small chances though. If both the links and icons on your site, as well as the autodiscory feature, are pointing to your Feedburner feed, the plugin becomes almost useless.
David Airey on July 14th, 2008 4:44 pm

Thanks for clarifying, Daniel.
Adam Pieniazek on July 14th, 2008 5:12 pm

Would a redirect in the .htaccess file from my site to feedburner prevent any readers from subscribing to my non feedburner feed? In other words would the autodiscovery feed get redirected to feedburner?

In either case, I noticed a few of the RSS links on my site weren’t pointing to my feedburner feed so I changed that this weekend. Thanks for pointing out the header info, off to update my headers now.
Ajay on July 14th, 2008 5:32 pm

I have redirected my feed to the Feedburner one using .htaccess.

I still link to the /feed/
G on July 14th, 2008 6:12 pm

Wow, handy little tool. Thanks, just changed mine while watching the video.
deuts on July 14th, 2008 9:40 pm

Well, this is supposed to be the job of feedburner feedsmith, right? The good thing with feedsmith is that it redirects not only your future subscribers, but also your past subscribers, whether they have subscribed using the feedburner rss link or the wordpress rss link. Another is that if you’re changing themes, you won’t always have to change the header just like in this case when you’re using the feedburner feedsmith plugin.
Rajaie AlKorani on July 15th, 2008 2:35 am

One of the first things I made sure of doing when I created my theme (since it’s in the header.php) file. Although, it will help many people who didn’t know, nice post!
Mr. Javo on July 15th, 2008 11:41 am

Nice tip, I checked mine but it’s ok
BioTecK on July 15th, 2008 12:52 pm

Damn! That’s a great tip!!
Daniel Harrison on July 15th, 2008 12:59 pm

Yeah, very guilty of not updating mine. Great tip though, as never thought of it. Hopefully see a jump in RSS subscribers over the next week or so.
Danny Foo on July 16th, 2008 1:57 am

Excellent share. It never really came across my mind about this.
Vaibhav on July 16th, 2008 4:55 pm

I had done this sometime ago and blogged about it (although I agree that the video is a much better medium to show how). Here’s my link: http://blog.gadodia.net/how-to.....e-correct/

Once I had changed those Urls, my feeburner subscription stats jumped a lot.

But that is nothing compared to what happened after I installed FeedSmith. Basically, if you install FeedSmith, it will solve all the problems because it redirects access to any feed source on your blog to your feed burner feed (even comments, if you configure it accordingly). Here’s my post on FeedSmith: http://blog.gadodia.net/get-th.....r-numbers/
ikalangita on July 19th, 2008 6:42 pm

thanks for the video! i’ve never updated my header.php for wordpress!
i will do it quickly!
my blog
Susan on July 24th, 2008 8:48 am

Thanks the video tip! I didn’t know about the RSS info in header.php either! I’ve updated my blog header now. I do have one question, how do you change the icon that appears next to the web URL or the title when you bookmark a website?