Disable the Feedburner Redirect

Feedburner displayed a redirection link to my article instead of the direct link to the article on my blog. In case you are wondering: Feedburner is a service that blog owners can use to distribute their feed, get statistics and ensure maximum compatibility with most feed readers out there.

Essentially, every link in my feed that pointed to my blog was a Feedburner redirect in the form of http://feeds.ghacks.net/~r/Ghacksnet/~3/172961335/ which did not look nice and may also cause linking issues, for instance when users use the link to promote the contents. Why? Because if I decide to stop using Feedburner, it is almost certain that those links would become invalid in the process.

I did find out that it had something to do with tracking the clicks of the subscribers to compile better statistics that are then displayed to the webmaster when Feedburner is opened. This is something that I do not need which is why I decided to take a look and see if it was possible to disable the redirect.

It took a while until I found the setting that was responsible for this behavior. If you want to disable it you have to go into the Analyze tab of your Feedburner account, click on the 'Dare to be different' link under Site Stats and uncheck 'Item Link Clicks' there.

The redirection links will disappear immediately afterwards.

Update: The feature has been moved around a little in the latest version of the Feedburner service. You now find it under Analyze > Configure Stats. Here is is still listed as item link clicks which you need to disable. Note that you won't get as many detailed stats as before when you do that.

It you do not use Feedburner for statistics -- why then if I may ask -- you can disable that. I have stopped using the service some years ago and serve all requests directly again. One of the main reasons for that is Google's neglect of the service, another that it is too limiting in regards to which feeds users can subscribe to.

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