How to Solve the Redirect Error in Google Webmaster

Ok, first I will illustrate the issue. One fine day my vistior count dropped. At first I thought it was due to Google Sandboxing or penalizing my site. But when i searched the net I found that I was still having the same ranking. But I wan in for a huge shock when I opened my Sites Google Webmaster. My site had more than 3300+ links/pages as "URLS not followed". When I saw the detail everyone of the error showed "Redirect Error". Now I was clear why my Rankings dropped.

I will first illustrate why this porblem arised and then give the solutions. My blog is hosted on Blogger and I have made the Site feed point to my Feedburner feed. Recently Google forced me to transfer my feedburner feeds to google. It was a pretty smooth transition and I didn't lose a single user as Google already redirected my feedburner feed to Google feed. Everything worked fine till Google changed their crawling algorithm. If you go to Google webmaster site, tools options and click "Analyse Robot.txt" you can see your current Robot.txt. For a Blogger blog, it will be similiar to:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: http://www.xxxxxx.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Now there lies the real problem which creates the Redirect error. Google uses our feed as Sitemap. The problem with the current system is that my site feed is redirected to feed burner which inturn is redirected to "feedburner google" feed. Earlier all worked fine as Google never cared about re-directs. Now it looks like Google is carefully avoiding links with more than one re-direct.

So the solution is simple make your site feed pointed to your google feed. i.e go to feedburner.google.com and copy the address of your feed and put it in your blog feed (Layout->settings-->Site Feed). This will solve the issue. But it will take minimum of to weeks to de-list all your URLs from Not followed. But finally my site traffic has picked up.

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