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With the plethora of podcast distribution channels out there it certainly can be hard to keep track of if everything is working. Unfortunately, I did run into a problem with my Anchor feed on the Google Podcasts player, which admittedly is currently my favorite player to use to listen to shows.
I can listen on my phone and also on my desktop. But then my own new podcast episodes weren’t showing up. Weird. I looked and noticed that it was missing episodes and then stopped updating completely.
I reached out to Anchor Support to see what was going on. They said Google Podcasts was now pulling my podcast from the Spreaker feed. Spreaker is another podcasting platform which shares some episodes of my show. You have to upgrade to keep it on there after a few episodes and five hours of audio, which is maybe eight episodes or so.
I edit and distribute my show through Anchor.fm so I really don’t have the need for Spreaker as a new host. Nothing against Spreaker per se, but I’m an Anchor fan!
The feed in Google Podcasts
The friendly support person at Anchor told me about the problem with the feed after I asked so I logged into my Google Podcast Manager account and lo and behold there was a warning. “The show is now being served from a different feed. Data may be partial until the new feed is verified.”
To verify it is just a click of a button away! But I don’t want to verify it. Either way, click the verify button and you’ll get this screen:
Click on “If you believe this to be a mistake let us know” which sends you here:
Submit the form and hopefully somebody at Google will fix it soon.
Deleting my Spreaker podcast
In the meantime, I also decided to just delete my Spreaker podcast feed. If it’s only distributing a limited number of episodes without an upgrade what good does it do me to have it on there? And at this stage, I don’t see a reason why I need to upgrade and pay for it. I’m staying with Anchor for now.
To delete your Spreaker podcast first you have to delete all episodes. It’s not that many so no biggie.
After that go to the delete podcast section. You may have to wait for a while as the episodes are being deleted. Then delete the podcast.
Was it smart to delete my Spreaker feed?
Maybe I should’ve waited until I got a response from Google. Here’s what they said a day later:
Hello Christoph,
Thank you for contacting Google Podcasts Team.
After reviewing your request, we’re unable to make the podcast feed update because the current feed (https://www.spreaker.com/show/4577966/episodes/feed) seems to be inaccessible. This prevents us from confirming and verifying that the feeds belong to the same owner. We have attached a screenshot. Alternatively, there are 2 ways you can resolve the issue:
1. Setup a 301 redirect from the old feed (https://www.spreaker.com/
show/4577966/episodes/feed) to new one (https://anchor.fm/s/5c5259c/ podcast/rss) and notify us. Our team will take another look to see if we can confirm that both podcast feeds belong to the same organization. If confirmed, we will go ahead and help update the feed URL that Podcasts Manager uses in Google Podcasts. or
2. Google Podcasts can take up to a week to properly crawl and index updates made to the RSS feed. Google will soon stop indexing your podcast from the old RSS feed. Once that happens, you may register your podcast with the new RSS feed URL and claim ownership of it on Podcasts Manager.
In other words had I not deleted the Spreaker feed Google may have been able to fix it right then but since I deleted it I’ll have to wait for Google to re-crawl and re-index the non-working feed and then I can resubmit my actual feed.
It looks like it took me maybe a week or so to even realize this was a problem. Then another day to hear back from Anchor. Now it’s with Google. Either way, I think it’s on the right track now to be fixed again so you can listen to the show on Google Podcasts. Of course, it’s also available on other channels like Apple, Amazon, Podchaser, Spotify and more.