But if you want to submit your feed to Google Webmaster Tools, Google will be redirected to your Feedburner too. While you may expect it to work, in some case it won’t. If you track clicks on Feedburner in fact, your feed will have changed links in it. Feedburner changes the <link>URL</link> to an internal URL that will redirect to your own URL after tracking stuff.

As a consequence, if you submit your feed as a sitemap on Google Webmaster Tools, Google will show you errors like this:

This happens because the URLs in the Feedburner feed are not into your own domain but on http://feedproxy.google.com/

To fix this behaviour, easiest solution is having Google accessing your original feed (http://yourblog.tld/feed/) instead of being redirect to Feedburner. This can be easily done with a little change in the plugin.

Edit your plugin (with a text editor accessing the file via ftp, or just from the dashboard -> Plugins -> Editor, and select the FD Feedburner plugin) and look for this piece of code:

function feedburner_redirect() {
global $feed, $withcomments, $wp, $wpdb, $wp_version, $wp_db_version;

// Do nothing if not a feed
if (!is_feed()) return;

// Do nothing if feedburner is the user-agent
if (preg_match(‘/feedburner/i’, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) return;

// Do nothing if not configured
$options = get_option(‘fd_feedburner’);
if (!isset($options['feedburner_url'])) $options['feedburner_url'] = null;

Just change the line

if (preg_match(‘/feedburner/i’, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) return;

with:

if (preg_match(‘/(feedburner|google)/i’, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) return;

and you are done. Google won’t be redirected to your Feedburner feed, and it will use your original feed as sitemap.

Asking users to be a spy on paid links won’t work too much. Yes, ok, someone in the world knows for sure about a website who’s buying/selling links, but most of them can know about links only if they are involved. They should admit “I buy links” or “I sell links”. It won’t happen, of course. And most of spam reports about paid links will be just undemonstrable.

Google won’t be able to know about tons of paid links. As long as you don’t use Google Checkout to pay/cash or Gmail to negotiate…

But they are pushing SEOs to most sophisticated paid links. For example, no links on footer anymore, but instead put a link with the right anchor in a paragraph that speaks about the right topic. They already work better today. And tomorrow we’ll see much more about this phenomenon.