Changing your iTunes podcast feed

There will be times when you need to change the URL of your podcast feed.  But how do you tell iTunes that you are using a new URL?

If you’re setting up a podcast right now, you’re reading this at the right time.  By proactively using a redirection service like Feedburner to manage your RSS feed you can change your URL as you wish. 

If you’ve already had people subscribing to your show using the URL you need to change, then you’ve got some work ahead of you.

So how do you resolve this problem? 

There are two steps in fixing it:

1. Tell your existing podcast subscribers that the URL has moved
2. Point your old feed to the new location. 

Both of these solutions assume that your domain names are still current and you still have hosting in both places.

In order to follow these steps you’ll need to be able to manually update your feed. 

Telling your existing subscribers

There is a small line of code you need to add to your existing (old) RSS feed, to let your subscribers know that the show has moved.  You should leave this code in place for at least two episodes of your show after it has been moved to the new location.  The code is:

<itunes:new-feed-url>http://newlocation.com/example.rss

Where http://newlocation.com/example.rss is the location of your new feed.

You should place the new-feed-url at the level of your feed. So just after the

Telling new visitors to your old feed

This part is the trickier part, and it involves modifying your .htaccess file.  The good news is that if you follow the instructions then it’s only as hard as editing a text file.  In technical terms what we are doing is setting up a 301 redirect, which is an instruction to the web server to redirect all traffic to this particular file, to the new location.  What you need are: the address of your old feed, and the address of your new feed.  You will also need FTP access to your web hosting space.

The first step is to download your exising .htaccess file which you will locate in the root (or top level folder) of your hosting directory.

Once downloaded, open the .htaccess file using a basic text editor like notepad.

On a blank line you need to add the following code:

Redirect 301 /podcast/oldfeed/rss.xml http://newdomain.com/feed/newfeed.xml

Notice in the example the first section only shows the path from the existing top level folder, so you exclude everything from http:// to the first /

You’ll also see that the second part of the redirect shows the full path of the new web address including http://

Once done, save the file and upload the file to the same location as you downloaded it from.

You can test that everything has worked, by typing your old feed URL, and what you should see is that it automatically redirects you to the new location.

If it doesn’t do this, check your code for errors.

If you use WordPress there are plugins like Simple 301 Redirects that help you redirect pages to new locations without having to use the steps above.

Drop me a comment on the blog post if you hit any challenges, or have questions and I’ll see what I can do to help.