Episodes not showing up in iTunes

Hi Duke,

I’m not sure what the problem was. I can only say that the feed is valid and that it works fine.

I also can acknowledge your other observations and I would say that the Google search result is maybe not up to date. It is not possible to find your podcast with the search of the iTunes client software. That means usually that your podcast is not longer registered at the iTunes Store server. If that is the case then you should simply try register the podcast again.

Regards,
Tim

Hi Tim,
Thank you for the response.

It seems that I can still add new episodes if subscribed to the podcast. However, when I tried to re-submit the feed, I get this message:

“We had difficulty reading this feed. Bad http result code: 403.”

I’m not sure where to go from here. iTunes says it’s my hosting company’s problem, my hosting company says it’s iTunes.

I’ll keep trying to figure it out.

Duke.

The HTTP code 403 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_403) stands for “Forbidden”. It means that the access to the requested data was for the requester denied.
Do you limit the access to your blog for requests from certain IP addresses?

I think the problem may have been with a security plugin that I installed. I’ve since removed the security plugin and was told by my hosting company that all files should have returned to before the plugin was installed.

However, iTunes is now not even accepting the feed at all. The weird thing is that I just posted a new episode and it downloaded with no problem through iTunes if you are a subscriber.

My hosting company is getting back to me – I think that for some reason, iTunes cannot access the feed. I’ll post the solution – if I get one!

Thanks for your help and if you have anymore suggestions, please let me know!

Paul

Hi Again,
Still not working. Unfortunately, since iTunes has not read our feed in a while, they have removed it from the iTunes Store. Although, the episodes continue to come through if you were already a subscriber.

My hosting company is trying to locate the problem but they are having no luck. Does anyone have any suggestions? Should we just try and change the feed and re-submit to iTunes?

Thanks for any help.

Duke

Although, the episodes continue to come through if you were already a subscriber.

That is not surprising. Because once one has subscribed to the podcast the client software gets all data and content from your feed directly (and not from the iTunes page).

they have removed it from the iTunes Store

In this case it should be possible to re-admit the feed URL.

Hi,
Just wanted to say thank you for your help. Everything seems to be working fine now, although, I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Here’s what I did:

-The Bullet Proof Security plugin seemed to interfere with itunes. I removed BPS from WordPress, but some files remained in my backend. We thought we got rid of everything, but found some .htaccess files from BPS. Deleted those.

-I was having trouble re-submitting to iTunes. So, through Feedburner, I just created a new feed based on my main category (a category that every podcast goes through), re-submitted, and all episodes appeared instantly.

Thank you again for your help.

Duke